Pickguard Shielding

[Michael Masters]

Hi, I'm new here, and this is my first post outside the welcome forum.

I ordered the ST-1 kit with a black pickguard to be included. My intention from the start was to go with a full wood pickguard, but the kit did not come with any extra shielding material, nor did the black pickguard I ordered have it.

The only pick guard that had it was the one that all the electronics were wired to from the beginning.

My question is this:

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I can use for shielding material on the back of my wooden pickguard? I really don't want a noisy guitar.

Thanks in advance.

[Simon Barden]

You can get reels of copper shielding tape quite cheaply from eBay. Make sure that it says 'conductive adhesive', otherwise you'll need to solder the strips together. The conductive adhesive is very good and you should measure resistances across the tape in the order if 1 ohm or less. Some people prefer aluminium tape or foil for shielding purposes. Line the pickup and control cavities with it (make sure none of the signal wires are touching the tape or you'll get no sound) and the underside of the pickguard.

The tape/foil on the underside of the pickguard gets its connection to ground through contact with the grounded control pots. If you let some of the body cavity shielding tape come up over the top of the body underneath the pickguard, then it will make contact with the tape on the underside of the pickguard, and so get a path to ground. The shielding should run to the very top edge of the control cavities, and I prefer to overlap the edge by roughly 1mm all round, except where I'm deliberately running more tape over the top of the guitar for a large contact area with the pickguard (I run it over the wooden 'fingers' between the pickup routs).

If any of the tape is visible with the pickguard on, just trim it back.

I normally screen the whole underside of the pickguard.

You can do a similar thing with the jack socket cavity, but as the jack plate is metal and already grounded, you just need to shield the jack socket cavity. The jack plate is only slightly wider than the cavity, so I normally bring some tape up over the top at each end of the cavity up to the screw hole, then trim it back with a sharp knife (I use a scalpel), so that you can't see any of the tape with the jack plate fitted.

This is another area where it's easy for the end of the jack to short to ground on the shielding if you don't have the jack socket rotated correctly, so if you don't get any sound, I'd check this first. Sometimes it helps to put some insulating tape over the shielding where there's a possibility of the signal wires accidentally grounding.

[Michael Masters]

Okay, so, I am totally not even close to an electrician and a friend will be doing the wiring as that's his thing.

I know next to nothing about electronics and my friend has never done a guitar so he's just a clueless to the needs as I am, but I do get what you are saying, I just want to use the best possible material. Getting the tape off e-bay isn't really an option for me as I don't have enough time to wait.

It is safe to use ordinary aluminum foil or does it need to be the thick kind? Will aluminum insulating tape work? Like the kind that you wrap around stove pipes and furnace pipes and the like.

Thanks.

[Simon Barden]

Here's a photo of some shielding in a Strat copy I did for a friend. Note that the shielding needs to overlap a bit to get electrical continuity, not in side-by-side strips. It's worth checking the continuity with a multimeter. I ended up running a couple of strips crossways across the side-to-side strips I did on the underside of the pickguard as I was getting a lot of variable high-resistance readings without them.

[Dedman]

You can use snail barrier tape if you are wanting it urgently, available from hard ware and gardening stores.

[Simon Barden]

But doesn't snail barrier tape have non-conductive adhesive?

I ordered two different widths of tape (I didn't look hard enough when ordering and they were almost identical!) form two different Chinese suppliers on eBay. One turned up in a couple of days (must have held some local stocks) and the other in about 3 weeks.

There were lots of more expensive shielding tape options from local suppliers for much shorter lengths, some for next-day delivery on Amazon Prime, so you've normally got a 'need it now' option.

[Dedman]

I've used it in a pinch and got continuity over the whole cavity

[Michael Masters]

Hey guys,

So I went searching today. I hit 5 gardening stores, 3 hardware stores and 2 electronics and lighting stores. No one has even heard of let along ever seen copper tape. They even looked at me weird when I asked, welcome to Greece.

I ended up finding some copper plated wrapping paper at a bookstore on clearance from Christmas. I got it and tested it for current flow and it is quite conductive and it bends and holds a form like really thin copper sheet. It for sure contains actual copper, I was thinking to just use thin double sided tape to apply it.

Any thoughts?

[DrNomis_44]

Hey guys,

So I went searching today. I hit 5 gardening stores, 3 hardware stores and 2 electronics and lighting stores. No one has even heard of let along ever seen copper tape. They even looked at me weird when I asked, welcome to Greece.

I ended up finding some copper plated wrapping paper at a bookstore on clearance from Christmas. I got it and tested it for current flow and it is quite conductive and it bends and holds a form like really thin copper sheet. It for sure contains actual copper, I was thinking to just use thin double sided tape to apply it.

Any thoughts?

If you can find a hardware shop that stocks it, then you could try using some contact adhesive, like Kwik Grip, apply some of that to the underside of the pickguard, and it will stick the copper plated wrapping in place, you can also use common household aluminium foil as shielding material, but remember that you can't solder to it like you can with copper foil.

[Simon Barden]

I'd hold out for the proper stuff. It's something you can do anytime, so there's no reason to rush it. Have you tried looking on eBay for it?