Thumbwheel tone pot DIY help needed

[DaveS]

Well, you should use shielded cable, and the capacitor order of magnitude IS .0XXmf (rather than .XX)
I'd be inclined to find a local guitar shop to buy the little bit of cable you need, and the correct capitor.
Lots of wiring info out there, like
http://schattendesign.com/PDF/Thumbw...2011-LoRes.pdf
STEWMAC.COM : Wiring diagrams Free Information
and WDMusic

[mavri]

hi, very interesting threads
I send to you the Benedetto pickups schema that I received from them
of course ....vol linear ,,,, tone logarithmic

bye

[mavri]

i hope

[gitman]

the cost for shipping a normal padded envelope from Canada to Greece is $ 40.00 ????? That must be a typo or a gross mistake, man !
The plastic box the pots come in is smaller than a pack of cigarettes so you should really ask again.

[Cunamara]

Hey guys, a little help needed here!

I've finally got the thumbwheel pot through WDmusic (UK). In fact I bought 2 x 250K and 2 x 500K pots (as spare parts) for about 26euro (about 33$) including shipping from UK to Greece.

Attachment 6272Attachment 6273Attachment 6274

I also got some capacitors but I think they are not the right ones. I specifically asked for .022uf but the salesman insisted that I meant .22uf (no inscription on them). So I'd better find the right ones from another store.
I will also need some wire, a shielded one, right?
What type should I be looking for?

Could somebody help me with the wiring? Anything from a simple drawing, a photo or a link for a similar project..

When you look at the wiring diagrams posted above, you will notice that your pots have five terminals instead of three. The Schattens are grounded to the little circuit board to which they are attached, yours are not. So when you look at yours, the outer tabs (which are one piece of metal) are the ground, just like the casing of a regular pot. The middle three tabs are the same as the three tabs on the Schatten diagrams. Hopefully that will help. make sense of those diagrams as you look at them.

FWIW caps are rated in various ways which move the decimal point- farads, microfarads, picofarads, etc. The microfarad or mfd or uf or µf (all ways of saying the same thing) is usually what's used to describe guitar caps, but misunderstanding of this is rife. And some websites use all these different ways of writing these values from one item to the next, sometimes even adding in picofarads! For example:

Guitar Parts Factory :: Genuine Fender Capacitors

There are caps on the same page listed in picofarad, mfd, µf, etc. Sheesh (BTW I have ordered several times form this company and their shipping is prompt and reasonable within the US, can't help you with shipping to Greece).

0.022 caps and 500K pots for humbuckers and 0.047 caps and 250k pots for single coils are typical values. However, this is not some sort of law- I usually use a 500k volume pot and a 250 K tone pot with a 0.047 cap for my humbuckers because I hate bright, shrill tones. Kent Armstrong suggested this arrangement to me, works great. Amp caps can have much bigger ratings than the ones used in guitar circuits.

[lawson-stone]

There seem to be two ways of wiring the capacitor in setting up the tone control, one more modern, one more traditional. How does that look in setting up these thumbwheels?

[Matt Cushman]

There seem to be two ways of wiring the capacitor in setting up the tone control, one more modern, one more traditional. How does that look in setting up these thumbwheels?

The Schatten thumbwheel set up comes mounted to a small circuit board with a cap. included. The separate thumbwheel pots are just like any other pot. The main difference is in mounting them to something. The two tabs on the thumbwheel pots can be used as mounting tabs on a circuit board.