I’ve had my HSH (humbucker, single coil, humbucker) Strat for a while now and it’s great – however the previous owner replaced the bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan Invader – which is a great pickup in itself, but far to powerful when compared to the other pickups in place and doesn’t suit my playing style so well. After doing some research I came across Ironstone Pickups. A UK based independent pickup manufacturer with great reviews.
I then noticed that Ironstone had a great looking Ironstone Gilmour pre-loaded scratch plate that comes with a load of options you can select to really make the plate fit your needs – and it’s also a complete steal at £129.95 (24/01/22) including UK postage!
I took the plunge and placed an order for the Gilmour scratch plate, in black, with hybrid pickups, aged white hardware and the added bridge blend option (why not!). Within a day of placing the order Tony (the owner of Ironstone) was in touch to confirm some details and update me on the progress. Only a few days later I had the (very well packaged) set in my hands.
Ironstone have a great article up about shielding – and giving I was swapping everything out – it made sense to do it at the same time. My strat already had the paint on shielding in place, but after testing with a multimeter – the continuity between certain areas was missing. Time to get out the copper foil!
Pre-warning: This is purely how I did it, i’m not saying it’s gospel and there are no doubt many internet guitar wizardy gurus who once roadied for the the beatles and found Ozzy his brandy glass of brown m&m’s who will have a different opinion…but this is mine.
I picked up a roll of conductive adhesive copper foil from Amazon – it’s a 20 meter roll so there’s more than enough to do 2, if not 3 guitars with it. The process is pretty straight forward, make sure you clean out the cavities first (I used an old pain brush) to ensure the tape will stick. Just take your time and don’t cut the strips too long – the stuff really sticks well to itself! Overlap the edge of each piece of tape with the previous, this helps create continuity.
Here’s a few pics of the strips in progress, notice the small overlap onto the body of the guitar – this will help form contact with the shielded scratch plate later.
copper tape install.
After you’ve finished lining the main body cavity – you’ll need to do line the input jack cavity – follow the same process and add an extra piece of tape that will cover a screw hole – this will help the grounding. Once that all done, run a small piece of wire (I used 22AWG solid core) through the hole between the jack cavity and the main control cavity and solder this to the copper tape – this creates a connection between the two:
wire soldered in place.
of ground wire coming through from jack cavity.
Next on the shielding list is the backside of the scratch plate. Most scratch plates ship with a small triangle of foil/shielding around the control pots – we’re going to extend that shielding to cover the full plate. I found this easy enough to do in strips, and once you’ve done a few, take a sharp (new) razor blade and carefully trim back the tape a few millimeters from the edge:
Once you’ve finishes the scratch plate – next up is add an extra wire to the control cavity – this will connect to the loop on the back of the volume pot (handily already added by Ironstrone) – it simply connects the grounds on the control circuit to the main body.
One you’ve finished shielding everything…at this point, you want to grab your multimeter and check for continuity between each of the areas you’ve shielded (set your meter to continuity, place one probe from the multimeter in one area, touch another area with the other probe – if it beeps…you’ve got a connection/continuity).
With your continuity test done – to be super cautious I added electrical tape to the back of the control pots, the 5 way selector and the pickup wiring points – just to eliminate the possibility of anything touching the tape and grounding out.
One last place to add electrical tape is inside the jack cavity – add this at the bottom and on the back “wall” nearest the bridge – this will ensure the jack doesn’t short to ground when plugged in.
Now its time to reassemble everything – feed your ground wire through the hole in the cavity to the tremolo area (you’ll have to remake this hole in the foil as we covered it over), then feed the wire through for your jack connection and lastly solder the extra ground wire we added to the foil within the control cavity.
That’s it! String it up….and enjoy (hopefully) a hum free single coil experience!
