Strat shielding

From pickup maker Kinman:
Star grounding in a guitar is not the absolute necessity it is in 'active circuits' like CD players or Amplifiers where it is designed to inhibit ground loops. Guitars don't suffer from ground loops. It is practiced in guitars more as a convenience that serves simplicity, convenience and neatness of wiring. That means as long as all the ground wires ultimately connect to the output socket ground terminal all will be OK. In some circumstances it may be more convenient to piggyback some ground wires onto an intermediate grounded point that is different to the central main ground point on the cover of the volume pot.

Others will disagree, surely. :wink:

I did finish the shielding last weekend. I shielded the cavities and the pickguard, did not shield the pickups or change the wiring. I think it did reduce the hum.

As a side effect, I had to adjust the pickup heights, and in the process I realized that my action is too high because of pickup interference, and that the saddles were not set up to the right radius (I've been reading Dan Erlwine's book ..). I had decided to move from 9s to 10s, and I ended up tweaking the setup in this process. Now, the guitar plays real sweet! It was pretty good before, but I didn't realize this guitar could play so nice with a little bit of tweaking.

(This kind of thing seems addictive though: I am now thinking about upgrading the pickups, although there are so many choices and the benefits are not so clear ..)