Re: help! pickup hums when touching polepieces


"Benj" <bjacoby@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:87de4c2e-4384-4739-b445-139b90748259@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Feb 17, 6:05 pm, "Jose de las Heras" <jose...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I see your problem here. My pickup had a metal plate under the pole
pieces that connected them all. Do you see the problem? You have these
coils of wire going around the pole pieces. The coils have some copper
foil over the outside to shield them from hum pickup, but the pole
pieces just seem to be shoved into the coil. This is bad because the
poles are conductive which when you touch them feeds hum right into
the coils! To stop that you have to ground them somehow.

What makes it sillier, in my view, is that they did attempt to shield the
thing, and they put that copper shield under the pickup too, between the
coils and the magnets... so why not making sure the polepieces are touching
it???
Crap manufacture.
But it sounds great, one of the loudest MM-style pickups I ever heard, and
nice tone too. That's why I want to keep it!

Personally I like your little strips of copper foil. Looks pretty
decent. If this were my pickup and I didn't want to buy a new one, my
ultimate fix would be to get some conductive paint and put drops of it
from the copper foil up to the sides of the cleaned pole pieces. That
way the poles are clean on the top.

I like this idea. I'll probably do this eventually.


Obviously the guys building the
pickup weren't thinking about what they were doing. But then Mine had
the problem too. And I must say your copper strips beats the external
wire from the bridge I had jammed into mine for a while until I
finally got them grounded underneath.

:-) I was lucky to have a whole sheet of the stuff around, as I had just
shielded another bass.

Jose
--
www.mcnach.com
www.myspace.com/purplenoise68
-
Current favourite guitar: Fender 'Sambora' Stratocaster
Current favourite bass: Warwick Corvette $$



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