Make your OWN EMG-style non-solder plug in-and-outs?!?

stubhead

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Are there any phone/Ethernet-type techies here? I have been wracking my po li'l haid over trying to find a way to plug in different parts easily. This guy:



There's a black "pickguard" laying on top of the green one.Those pieces of 1/8" plywood in back are the templates for more pickup-mounting plates - I can just cut out 5.5" X 5.5" pieces of pickguard material, dill the four mounting holes, then screw 2-3-5-7 (?)(!) of them in between the wood templates and cut 'em all down. An 18mm hole saw, drilling five overlapping holes, dang near cuts a Strat pickup-sized hole by itself. I did the HB holes the hard way, but now with that hole saw, wowie!

So the pickup plates, and the rear control cavity, are on tiny 4-40 threaded inserts. And the neck, the bridge, and the Hipshot Trilogy are all on big steel 5/16-18 threaded inserts. (The strings can go though the back of the Schaller 475 bridge, to the Trilogy pitch changer. I also have a string-through body bridge. And a fretted neck too!)

And, in looking at the Ethernet-style jack and plugs, they carry eight little wires (a standard phone line jack/plug/wire has the capacity for six). There's a quite straightforward process of installing the jacks on a piece of cable, and installing wires on the plugs. You can get a network tool kit that has the crimper (for jacks) and the "punchdown tool" for plugs - apparently tech guys do this stuff all day long!

So, with one ethernet (RJ45) or a couple of phone jacks (RJ11) in the pickup's swimming pool, and another set in the control cavity, I could wire the pickups to a plug and the controls to a plug in the cavity.... what I need to find out is if there would be some interference that the signals carried by the cable would generate. The RJ45 cable consists of four different-colored paired wires, and they're braided and interwoven for shielding. You just straighten them out, lay each wire into the right-colored slot in the jack or plug, and BANG! the tool forces them into the slot and the connectors are cut into each one.

I'm going to hook this guitar up to just WORK for now, while I investigate the mysteries on some ol' beaterphonic, but this may be the answer. Has anybody ever dicked with these cables? It almost seems too easy to be true. Change pickups in five minutes? Surely a cable that can handle high-def zoomed in porn can transmit a few little squacks and twinks of an electric guitar. :icon_thumright:
 
RJ-11 and RJ-45 connectors typically use insulation displacement to tie the wires in into the socket/jack. When you "punch down" the wire into the connector, the pin cuts through the insulation to make contact with the conductor inside. This means they're designed for some fairly specific wire as far as conductor size and insulation thickness. For that reason, I'd wonder how you'd put connectors on the pickup leads. The chances of those wires being the right size are probably pretty small, and certainly so with shields/grounds.

As for noise, CAT 5/CAT6 cable isn't really shielded, per se. The wire pairs are twisted, which works sorta like shielding when you get up into the frequencies network communications take place at. But, down in the audio frequency range, that twisting doesn't do anything for you. So, you're gonna get some serious noise, even with humbuckers.
 
If this is to be a "test bed" guitar, you may want to consider something like this...

TS-S1-SW5A-Toneshaper-For-Stratocaster-A-980.jpg

They use terminal strips to connect the pickups, which allows you to do all sorts of weird things. Plus, they have a bajillion little DIP switches that'll let you change capacitors or how pots are wired, etc. just by flipping a few switches. Keeps you from soldering your life away, ruining parts all the while.
 
Or take a look at the Seymour Duncal liberator, it's like a really cut-down version of the thing Cagey posted. They did post a video up of Frank Falbo using it to change out a bridge humbucker in just under two minutes though.
 
OK, now, where does Seymour Duncan get the little strip with the various screw-down connectors that he then sticks on the back of the pot? It's sure to be in Mouser... but I don't know what it's called! :sad1: :sad1: The problem with the SD "Liberator"is, of course, switching - it would work as-is for a single-PU guitar with no tone control, but everything past that still needs soldering. I'm not afraid of burning up parts, it would just be a whole magnitude easier to unscrew a pickup, unclip the wires, insert other pickup, clip the new wires... if I can find like three of those clippy things, 5 wires each, I'd be pickin' in the tall cotton.
 
The Liberator is meant to work for either a 2-humbucker guitar, or a 3 single-coil guitar. So all the switches and pots are hard-wired, but the pickups aren't.

I did a similar thing myself using similar components:

20120617-IMG_8174-2.jpg


Really did make changing pickups a breeze.

To buy those things you'll have to google something like, 2.54mm pitch [or 0.1"] screw terminal.

They're designed for PCB mount but if you get some stripboard with the same pitch you're good to go. That's what I did in that pic up there.
 
Yeah, that's exactly what I need. Radio Shack beckons... cheap too! Seymour's making a bit of coin, huh? Buying wholesale, he's got about $4 in his $25 "Liberator"... :toothy12:
 
Radio Shack may be a bit disappointing in that category. They're not really in the component business any more. Not that they ever were in any serious way, but today you're lucky to find wire in the place, let alone anything as complicated and varied as terminal strips. They're more into batteries, cellphones and over-priced ultra-cheap Chinese toys.

You want to find somebody that sells parts from Phoenix Contact. I'm sure that's what Duncan is using. Resellers would include Allied, Mouser, RS Electronics, and places like that who supply electronics OEMs. Look for "micro terminal blocks", maybe with a modifier of "PCB mounted".

For future reference, if you're the experimenter type, you can ask for a catalog from any of those places and they'll send you something the size of the Manhattan phone book for nothing. Excellent reference material, if nothing else.
 
StübHead said:
Yeah, that's exactly what I need. Radio Shack beckons... cheap too! Seymour's making a bit of coin, huh? Buying wholesale, he's got about $4 in his $25 "Liberator"... :toothy12:
Yeah. I get a discount and I still think I'd make my own if I needed it.

I mean, if I didn't know what I was doing, I think $25 probably isn't that high of a price to pay for what it gives you - it's just that I do and I can make one that needn't be so generic.
 
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