Birthday Guitar

Due to my brother and I moving back to our parental home during lockdown, I have been hearing him play the guitar a lot more and decided to build him an electric since I had the time. I wanted to try something different to what I had done before, and settled on using a spare body I had with a custom pickguard and wiring setup.

I think I have a strong preference for building solid body guitars now, as cutting out the pickguard is such a tedious task and one slip will scratch straight across but that is my fault for cutting with the face up. After this and the back plate were complete, I started on the wiring. I settled for a simple volume control and 2 switches, one: switching a humbucker between series and parallel. And the other is a 3 way on/off/on switch for the single coil set up as: on/off/inverted, where inverted swaps the positive and negative wires causing the pickup to go out of phase, creating some harsher sounds.

Initially once this was plugged in, the hum was loader than the strings, so I had some work to do. I used 3 different techniques to help eliminate the hum:-

1. Shielding - I coated the inside of the cavities with conductive paint and hooked that up to the ground wires. This create a faraday cage around the components stopping unwanted signals from entering the wires from outside.
2. Shorter Wires - All of the conductive parts act like antennas, so making the wires shorter, limits what frequencies they pick up.
3. Twisting Wires - Having matching positive and negative wires twisted together cancels out any signals they pick up since, one wire will pick up the inverted signal to the other, so when they combine you get a zero sum change.

These three techniques together helped tremendously, eliminating the hum almost completely.