what works besides shielding tape?

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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.



In theory, maybe, but even there, not really. RF is, after all, an alternating thing, so the adhesive just makes it act like a capacitor. And as we all know, capacitors pass A/C. But even that is only if the adhesive has enough thickness to act as an insulator, and they don't.


There is a lot of bad information about shielding out there on the internet. It really is very basic. Cover the entire cavity with a conductive layer (be it a paint, a foil, or a box like on the `70s Gibsons), connect it to ground (and as long as your shield touches the pots, and you have your pot bodies grounded, your covered - hell, Gibson just grounded the shield boxes to the output jack and used the shield boxes as a ground buss for all the pots). Anything more than that is a bunch of crap.

And the guy who says you should have some kind of a capacitor between the bridge and the ground, he's wrong, and the way he does it wouldn't work anyway. He has too many paths to ground which he isn't thinking about, so if somehow an amp did manage to send D/C up the line (which is completely impossible, by the way, as the pin on the preamp tube to which the guitar is connected to carries no D/C current what so ever, even in the worst amp designs), his design wouldn't help in the least.


Light

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

There is a way to get around this. Fold the edge of the tape over just a little bit on the edge where it meets another taped surface. You want to fold the the tape edge over so you are sticking the adhesive side back on itself to the same adhesive side. You will be left with a thin strip on one edge of the tape that has two non-adhesive but directly-conductive surfaces. When you apply this full strip of tape in the cavity, make sure the thin two-sided edge of the tape makes direct contact with the other taped surface. Solder, glue or tape the contacting edges of the two taped surfaces together. That way there is direct, tape-to-tape conductive contact with no adhesive between them; the solder/glue/additional tape is only there to make sure the edges stay together and serves no conductive purpose. I used this method in a pinch in guitars, pedal steels and amplifiers and there is always perfect continuity measured between the surfaces on my multimeter.
 
And the guy who says you should have some kind of a capacitor between the bridge and the ground, he's wrong, and the way he does it wouldn't work anyway. He has too many paths to ground which he isn't thinking about, so if somehow an amp did manage to send D/C up the line (which is completely impossible, by the way, as the pin on the preamp tube to which the guitar is connected to carries no D/C current what so ever, even in the worst amp designs), his design wouldn't help in the least.


Light

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

I would not say it is "completely impossible" to get DC up the instrument cable to the guitar shielding. In repairing tube amps over the years, I have seen old two-pronged tube amps like Oahus and Airlines that have tube shorts or filter-capacitor failures and put AC voltage on the ungrounded "ground" point for the amp: the amp chassis. With the ground on a shielded instrument cable running from the amp chassis back to the guitar, I have had friends get zapped when they touched the guitar strings and bridge (connected to the guitar's ground point on the output jack). Sometimes the instrument cable will fail first but not always. You can run into the same risk with failing three-pronged amps if you use a two-to-three-prong converter on your amp because the local bar only has old two-prong outlets. While this risk is not something everyone will face, the risk of DC coming back to the guitar is not completely impossible and has happened to folks before.
 
In theory, maybe, but even there, not really. RF is, after all, an alternating thing, so the adhesive just makes it act like a capacitor. And as we all know, capacitors pass A/C. But even that is only if the adhesive has enough thickness to act as an insulator, and they don't.

In the first place, all capacitors do not pass all AC. There is a formula - from my very rusty memory, I believe it's f = 1/2(pi)C - to calculate the pass frequency of a capacitor. At any frequency below its pass frequency, a capacitor is an insulator. (I know that it's a 12 dB/octave rolloff, not a sharp cutoff, but that works to a first approximation.)

In the second place, I deal with materials all the time in my job which are a micron thick or less which function very well as insulators.

In the third place, I'd bet that any capacitor you could build by painting on an adhesive between two pieces of foil would be of such a low value that the pass frequency would orders of magnitude above anything you'd encounter in shielding a guitar.
 
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

my first time around i used the spray. in a nutshell, it sucked ass. if any of you are thinking about doing this, use brush on adhesive.
 
In the third place, I'd bet that any capacitor you could build by painting on an adhesive between two pieces of foil would be of such a low value that the pass frequency would orders of magnitude above anything you'd encounter in shielding a guitar.



Which is to say, from any practical point of view, it quite simply isn't an issue.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
While this risk is not something everyone will face, the risk of DC coming back to the guitar is not completely impossible and has happened to folks before.



Fine, on an amp which is even marginally functional, you can not get DC up the cable. The only way I can think of to get DC up the ground of the cable is if you have a solder joint fail after the Power Transformer, which is almost certainly going to blow a fuse, but if you have (quite stupidly) disabled the fuse, and some how the circuit doesn't trip, sure, you could die.

But it's never gonna happen.

And even if it did, the design that has been spread around so much wouldn't help, as there are several paths around the cap in question. You could wire it otherwise, but there is no reason to do so.

And by the by, most shocks on stage (every one I've ever seen) are from a ungrounded amp being plugged into a different circuit than the PA, and then having your lips touch a microphone.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Which is to say, from any practical point of view, it quite simply isn't an issue.

Precisely. The adhesive between the layers of foil will not make a big enough capacitor to pass any frequencies we care about and the smaller a capacitance gets, the closer it gets to being an insulator. Which speaks to my point; if you stick pieces of foil together with a non-conductive adhesive, they are electrically isolated (insulated from one another) with respect to any frequencies of interest and the ungrounded segments are useless as a shield.

I won't bore you with the details, but I deal with this stuff at my work literally every day.

But anyway, it's easily remedied. There is copper tape with a conducting adhesive available; I've got a couple of rolls of it right here on my desk. Or you can just put a little solder across the seams. I wouldn't recommend just folding it over so that it touches; copper forms a non-conducting oxide on its surface.
 
solderwick

You can bond the copper tape pieces easily with a product called " SolderWick" which is available at your local RadioShack. It is a copper braided material with a flux added to make solder stick to it very easily. Available in several sizes but the small stuff worsk great.

chazba
 
You can bond the copper tape pieces easily with a product called " SolderWick" which is available at your local RadioShack. It is a copper braided material with a flux added to make solder stick to it very easily. Available in several sizes but the small stuff worsk great.

chazba

There you go, although that stuff is actually made to remove solder.
 
But anyway, it's easily remedied. There is copper tape with a conducting adhesive available; I've got a couple of rolls of it right here on my desk. Or you can just put a little solder across the seams. I wouldn't recommend just folding it over so that it touches; copper forms a non-conducting oxide on its surface.



There is no remedy needed. It works fine with regular aluminum foil and spray adhesive, which is not "conductive." I'm not talking about theory here, I'm talking about actual real life experience. In our shop we have shielded thousands of guitars, and we make a lot of use of aluminum foil. Think of it this way - I can buy the copper stuff you're talking about for like $4 for a big sheet of it (about 12X12), that will do one or two pickguards (at most). Or, I can buy a $3 roll of aluminum foil that will do the job just as well on about $50 pickguards. Now, for my own guitars, I use copper, but the main reason I do so is because if I don't people ask me why not and think that I'm cutting corners - even though I'm not - simply because of the awful information on the internet.


Light

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

What you are saying is completely untrue. Additional thickness makes a HUGE difference. At one skin depth worth of thickness, you only get about -9 dB attenuation, and a layer of conductive paint is nowhere near the skin depth for any signals that you might care about. Skin depth is dependent upon the conductivity, the magnetic reaction of the material (if applicable), and the frequency you are trying to block. We'll use aluminum for a quick example.

Aluminum foil ranges from 0.004318mm to 0.14986mm. Quick back-of-the-napkin ballpark numbers suggest that the cutoff frequency at that skin depth is somewhere around 1 MHz... maybe only 800 kHz... like I said, a very crude ballpark estimate. This means that the frequency at which you get a 9dB cut lies somewhere in the middle of the AM radio band. Higher frequencies will be attenuated more, lower frequencies less. An awful lot of interference is caused by rectified radio stations, so high attenuation in the AM band is pretty important.

The heavy copper foil I'm suggesting would have a cutoff somewhere in the vicinity of 50-60 kHz. That should block any possibility of a radio station magically getting rectified inside your gear, leaving only pure 60 Hz hum to cause interference. That same point in the middle of the AM band is at about five skin depths in this material because it is about four times as thick and made of copper which is about 1.25 times as conductive (ballpark again). Five skin depths is the point at which a signal is generally considered to be zero (about a 45 dB cut) and is the recommended level of shielding for RFI in electronics.

Conductive paint is damn near useless compared to copper tape. You're lucky to get 50,000 ohms per square even if you get a thick enough coat to be consistent (and you need several coats to even get that). Compare that with pure copper, which is on the order of ten milliohms per square even in coats that are 2 micrometers thick. So copper is five million times as conductive (or, I might need to take the square root, in which case it's 2236 times as conductive... I'm not 100% positive about that).

The skin depth of the AM radio band in conductive paint would therefore be a layer of conductive paint about 330 meters thick, give or take, assuming 50,000 ohms per square. At a more typical 300 kilohms per square, you'd need a layer of paint that is a whopping 1.23 miles thick to get a 9dB drop in the middle of the AM radio band.

Oh, and it decays with the square root of the frequency, so the 9dB drop point of a layer of conductive paint is about 25 exahertz. (25 million million million hertz). Conductive paint is crap. You might as well paint the inside with Krylon.

For some more corroboration, here's a blind test of hum rejection in cables where the results in order from best rejection to worst were neatly arranged almost precisely in increasing order of shield resistance per unit length.

If you can't detect a difference between shielding paint and copper, it isn't because there is no difference in effectiveness. It's because you aren't in an environment with enough RFI to matter and/or don't have any dirty contacts, etc. inside the guitar acting like a rectifier to tune radio station signals into audible sound. Put yourself in an RF-noisy environment, though, and you'll easily be able to detect the difference. For an easy ten second test, buy a GSM cell phone. :D
 
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a bunch of theory which has nothing to do with reality



I do this all the time, and your theory is completely besides the point. Is there a difference? Maybe. Can you actually hear the difference in a real life situation? No, not at all. It's simply not an issue. Trust me, I've done WAY more of these than (probably) anyone else here, and when you add in the rest of the guys in our shop, it's just not even close. There is no question that in real life, none of that shit matters.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
I do this all the time, and your theory is completely besides the point. Is there a difference? Maybe. Can you actually hear the difference in a real life situation? No, not at all. It's simply not an issue. Trust me, I've done WAY more of these than (probably) anyone else here, and when you add in the rest of the guys in our shop, it's just not even close. There is no question that in real life, none of that shit matters.

The math I did proves beyond any reasonable doubt that if you are near an AM radio transmitter, copper foil will eliminate RFI, while paint won't. As I said, if you aren't hearing a difference, you aren't in the right spot.

Take your gear and do a concert outside a block from a clear channel (not Clear Channel) AM transmitter tower. If you do that and still can't hear a difference, I'll believe that it doesn't make a difference.
 
There is no remedy needed. It works fine with regular aluminum foil and spray adhesive, which is not "conductive." I'm not talking about theory here, I'm talking about actual real life experience. In our shop we have shielded thousands of guitars, and we make a lot of use of aluminum foil. Think of it this way - I can buy the copper stuff you're talking about for like $4 for a big sheet of it (about 12X12), that will do one or two pickguards (at most). Or, I can buy a $3 roll of aluminum foil that will do the job just as well on about $50 pickguards. Now, for my own guitars, I use copper, but the main reason I do so is because if I don't people ask me why not and think that I'm cutting corners - even though I'm not - simply because of the awful information on the internet.


Light

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

'Tweren't I who said aluminum foil wouldn't work. I was addressing the issue of grounding as it relates to conducting versus non-conducting adhesives in overlapping conducting tape/foil/film applications, which is a very real-world everyday situation for me. I refuted the AC conductance via capacitance model that you proposed.

As to the skin depth/resistivity etc. ad nauseum argument for thick copper over Al foil... well, I just don't know, but it seems a little strange to me that someone would spout all that theory and then say that a thin layer of non-conducting adhesive conducts. That just ain't so.

One thing I do know, though. I have some medium tension power lines that run up the side of my property, and they generate a significant 60Hz EM field in my studio. It gives me fits; I have to orient microphones at right angles to the field not to get hum in the signal, and every TV in my house has weird color spots in the corners if I turn them parallel to the lines. I've had the utility company engineer over with his measurement equipment; I forget what the field strength is, but he was surprised at its magnitude.

I have a friend who has a Strat that is shielded, and he has no problems anywhere else, but if he plays in my studio with a lot of gain and stands with his axe parallel to the power lines, his amp howls like a banshee.
 
As to the skin depth/resistivity etc. ad nauseum argument for thick copper over Al foil... well, I just don't know, but it seems a little strange to me that someone would spout all that theory and then say that a thin layer of non-conducting adhesive conducts. That just ain't so.

Ah. I think I misunderstood an earlier post. I read spray adhesive as conductive paint. :D

That said, what I said about a thin layer was, "thin enough glue to make a solid connection through it", not that nonconductive glue became conductive in a thin layer, but rather that with a thin enough layer, the glue squishes aside in spots as you press it, causing an uneven distribution of non-conductive sticky patches and conductive bare spots of direct metal-on-metal contact.

It doesn't have to make contact at every point; it just has to make contact across enough total surface area to have a low resistance. That doesn't take much. A faraday cage can have gaps, so long as the gaps are significantly shorter than the wavelength you're trying to block. A 10 micron thick layer of glue would let through anything over 30 terrahertz (approximately). I can live with that. :D

For all I know, they might have used a conductive glue, but I doubt it. Probably just squishing the glue out of the way in enoguh spots to make a solid contact. In any case, I measure 0 ohms resistance (+/- 1) from piece to piece.
 
The only material that can totally block 60Hz EM radiation is called MuMetal and is very expensive alloy of iron and other stuff. You can check it out at www.mumetals.com



chazba
 
The only material that can totally block 60Hz EM radiation is called MuMetal and is very expensive alloy of iron and other stuff. You can check it out at www.mumetals.com



chazba



Which is going to help a lot, considering the giant holes in the Faraday Shield right where the pickups need to poke through it.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
So . . . anybody ever try floating the pickup and building an amp with a balanced input :confused:
 
the best idea yet mshilarious....Gibson made a LoZ lespaul for a while. Not a howling success, but not bad sounding.
I can see that mumetal would present a lotta problems, not to mention the expense. Maybe I'll just try the samarium cobalt p'ups.

chazba
 
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