Hot Rodding Your Strat Part IV: Shielding
Using the infinite wisdom found at GuitarNuts, I’ve shielded my Strat.
I went the cheap, quick and easy route and used the aluminum-foil-and-rubber-cement method. I’ve got a gig coming up Sunday and I have a feeling I’ll be needing a backup axe, so I threw Cherry back together real quick-like after adding the shielding and removing the tone controls and pickup selector switch.
Wired as is, all 3 pickups are always active, with only a volume control… all three stock Affinity Squier pickups that is, which used to have a mean 60Hz buzz. I’m glad to say that they buzz no more after this simple mod; I can’t believe what a difference a little bit of aluminum foil can make!
(I accidentally reversed my middle pickup during the whole process, so I’m not sure how much that has to do with the whole humlessness of this baby now, but I think I like the effect…)
Check out these pictures of the body cavity shielding if you just can’t put it all together in your mind. Seeing as I’m a dumbass and all, I neglected to take pictures of the pickguard shielding, but you can probably imagine the same thing, just applied to the underside of the pickguard.
A (very rough) schematic of the wiring:
For now, I skipped the capacitors recommended by Guitar Nuts… so if you guys don’t hear from me again after Sunday, you can assume I’ve fried by my axe due to laziness… or maybe I’ll just still be hungover, so wait until Monday or Tuesday before you start grieving/celebrating my death.
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Comments
Ah thanks for bringing that to my attention… looks like my Hot Rodding tag disappeared when I was doing some tagging, should be back in order now,link to http://madstratter.com/category/hot-rodding
I’m definately a fan of all 3 pickups, although I’m gonna have to do something about the “always on” part… maybe add the all-3-on as just one option when I replace the switch.
The hot rod tag link I used in my Cherry post, doesn’t work anymore, and I notice your “Hot Rodding” tag doesn’t do the whole Cherry series. I wanna add your project to my Strat Wiring Diagram post links. That post gets most of my traffic, and would help bring you more traffic as well. Let me know if you add a common tag to all your Cherry posts ok.
BTW, do you like it with all 3 pickups always on? Are you picking all over the place now?
jp