what works besides shielding tape?

  • Thread starter Thread starter capnkid
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Shielding what??

Hope you ain't shielding electrical wires with tin foil??:D
 
Do not forget that you have to ground whatever shielding you are going to be using in order to have any effect. Otherwise, a shield that is "floating" and not properly grounded acts as one big antenna for noise.

With that in mind, anything that you can insert and secure inside the body as shielding AND connect to a ground wire will work. I have used expensive shielding tape, aluminum foil (harder to secure and attach to ground if you are not patience and careful), shielding paint (the kind I used was much harder to attach to ground), and my personal favorite: HVAC foil tape for ventilation/heating ducts from a hardware store. The HVAC tape is great as its is inexpensive, you can generally find it at any store (Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, Wal-Mart, Shopko, etc.), it sticks well and conforms to the body cavity, and you can attach a ground wire to it with a little patience.
 
Go to a hardware store and pick up some foil duct tape. It us used for heating and AC ducts.
 
Aluminum foil works fine. Just make sure you have a connection between all areas of the shield (which is to say, your pickguard or coverplate shield needs to touch cavity shield). If your pots touch the shield, your shield is grounded. It really is that simple.

Personally, I use shielding paint for the cavities (because it is much faster than trying to use the foil inside the cavities, and time is money) and copper foil for my covers, but mostly just because I have the copper in large sheets that I can use to cover the plates with very quickly.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
how does the ground work then? A new jack with a ground wire?
Daav
 
timboZ said:
Go to a hardware store and pick up some foil duct tape. It us used for heating and AC ducts.
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OK, but I'm pretty sure that the adhesive is not conductive. If you use more than one piece to do the job, each piece must be grounded.
 
daav said:
how does the ground work then? A new jack with a ground wire?
Daav
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No, the shielding is to be connected to some point on the ground node in the cavity. The existing jack already has ground: the sleeve connection.
 
I bought this kit on ebay. There was enough material for two guitars. You can solder directly to the copper. That reminds me.. I need to order another one.
 
My personal favorite...Just make sure to connect it to your pots...
 
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You should be able to get copper foil tape at any decent hardware store that sells garden supplies. It's sold as a way to keep slugs out of your garden. Copper tape works much better than aluminum. The thickness matters, as does the conductivity. You want the thickest stuff you can get, and the stuff people use in gardens definitely qualifies. It's really heavy stuff.

The slug copper tape glue (at least on the stuff I bought) has thin enough glue to make a solid connection through it (unlike the shitty copper trace tape I bought at Fry's which NEEDS to be conductive through the glue!) so you pretty much just apply the stuff and make sure it makes physical contact with the foil that's already on the back of your guitar's faceplate.
 
dgatwood said:
You should be able to get copper foil tape at any decent hardware store that sells garden supplies. It's sold as a way to keep slugs out of your garden. Copper tape works much better than aluminum. The thickness matters, as does the conductivity. You want the thickest stuff you can get, and the stuff people use in gardens definitely qualifies. It's really heavy stuff.

The slug copper tape glue (at least on the stuff I bought) has thin enough glue to make a solid connection through it (unlike the shitty copper trace tape I bought at Fry's which NEEDS to be conductive through the glue!) so you pretty much just apply the stuff and make sure it makes physical contact with the foil that's already on the back of your guitar's faceplate.
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have you directly compared heavy duty aluminum foil and copper foil tape in the same guitar?
 
TravisinFlorida said:
have you directly compared heavy duty aluminum foil and copper foil tape in the same guitar?
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No, but I'm familiar enough with the electrical properties of the material to be quite certain that it will make a difference. I have, however, compared an unshielded guitar to one shielded with this stuff. Night and day doesn't begin to cover it. :D

The most important property here is skin depth. Skin depth is related to conductivity. At least for non-ferrous metals, better conductors are better shields, and copper is a much better conductor. Copper would be about 20% better at the same thickness. Sadly, you will never reach the skin depth at 60 Hz, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't help to have thicker, more conductive material.

In practice, the best you can do is shunt as much as possible to ground. Again, conductivity plays a key role. That, in turn, is determined by material and thickness.

BTW, the copper tape I'm talking about is a couple orders of magnitude thicker than the heaviest aluminum foil I've seen, so you win on that count, too. :) This stuff bends about like card stock.... Well, maybe not quite that stiff, but it is very thick....

Of course, the ideal metal is probably iron, but nobody wants to carry that around. :D
 
it seems logical that the copper foil tape would work better but i wouldn't actually claim that it does until i've directly compared it with the aluminum. sometimes things aren't always what they seem.
 
dgatwood said:
The slug copper tape glue (at least on the stuff I bought) has thin enough glue to make a solid connection through it (unlike the shitty copper trace tape I bought at Fry's which NEEDS to be conductive through the glue!) ...
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Unless you connect a wire to each section of tape, the adhesive has to be electrically conductive, else you'll have sections which are electrically floating and therefore ineffective at shielding. The thickness of the glue has nothing to do with it; if it is not a conductive glue and you have tested it and seen electrical continuity, that just means that there are gaps in the glue film and the sections are in mechanical contact, and that is prone to failure.
 
dgatwood said:
Copper tape works much better than aluminum. The thickness matters, as does the conductivity.
Click to expand...


Nope, not true at all. In the case of a Faraday Cage, which is what we're talking about here, conductivity doesn't matter at all. Or, more accurately, it doesn't matter enough to make any difference in effectiveness. Truly and honestly, it just doesn't matter. Any reasonably conductive metal will completely stop RF from getting in, which is all that you need.

I have used both, and there is NO difference. Sure, copper is a better conductor (until it gets oxidized, by the way, which WILL happen with copper, and not with aluminum), but you just don't need that level of conductivity to do the job. You, in fact, do not even need a solid material. You could do it just as well with a copper or aluminum mesh (think copper window screen), I just can't think of any reason why you would want to.

The way I do it is to use shielding paint to do the cavities, and copper foil on my back plates. The ONLY reason I use the copper is because I get it in sheets large enough to do an entire backplate (four actually) with a single sheet, and already had adhesive on it. I very much dislike using spray adhesive (it gets in my arm hairs and makes me feel gross for hours), and it takes longer to do the job with the spray stuff (and time is money).


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
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