Pot-rodding CTS mini potentiometers

[stan]

Wow excellent work, DIY pots, what next?

[fender3x]

what next?

Well, since you asked... I have been trying to think of a way of keeping the wires from being visible through the F-Holes... My current idea is to make a sort of rigid frame our of stiff copper wire. Not sure if this is the same in Australia, but what I am using is the ground (earth) that comes in household wiring. It's about 2mm thick copper.

Tried it on on pots and a jack that I am not going to use, and it seemed to work well in the experiment:





I did a test run partly because the ground wire is pretty thick and I thought I might need to leave the soldering iron in place so long to get everything hot that it might damage the pots. Good news is they seem to have come through without problems.

Took a couple of tries to get the technique down, but the key is (a) tin everything, the wire, the pot housing and the iron, and then (b) get the iron really hot. I can set my soldering iron from 10-50w, and for this I had it on 50w. I touched the tinned soldering iron tip to the tinned wire, got it hot, then touched both to the tinned pot housing for as brief a time as possible, and removed heat as soon as I saw the pot housing solder begin to flow. Tested each pot housing and the jack ring with a multimeter to make sure all there was continuity everywhere.

The other trick, since this is for a semi-hollow and must fit through an F-hole, is to replicate the hole pattern from the guitar on a piece of cardboard or, preferably, thin wood. Since the frame is rigid, it needs to line up pretty exactly with the holes.

Still thinking about the next step. What I am tempted to do is to wire up the pots with ordinary wire, then wrap them to the copper wire framework with aluminum tape. Any place the tape touches the pot or copper wire it will be grounded, and that should shield the wire.

I also have a little wire mesh tube on order that I may use with some shrink wrap to do the same thing. Whatever way I go, I am thinking the copper wire framework will keep it out of sight around the F-hole.

One note, I am using a C&K pickup selector switch. On the pic with the cardboard you can see that the framework does not extend to it. The reason is that I could not, as we say "for love or money" get solder to stick to the metal side of the switch. I was using an extra switch in the experiments, and the good news is that all my cooking did not seem to damage the switch. But nothing made solder stick to it either...