Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum

Forum Ringside => Tech => Topic started by: f.sardis on December 19, 2008, 08:18:09 PM

Title: pots, caps, scratching and odd behaviour
Post by: f.sardis on December 19, 2008, 08:18:09 PM
alrighty, so far i have wired the neck pickup only while waiting for the bridge pickup to arrive from the conversion to 52mm.
my pots are behaving funny, even though they are new they are slightly scratchy. I put some WD40 in there to stop it but only made slight improvement. they are not scratchy throughout the entire range, just one specific bits. is it possible that i damaged them when soldering?

second problem is the tone control. i am using a linear pot for tone Alpha B500K, no idea why it called B but the audio ones are marked A500K. anyway, i put a .022 orange drop in there (i think) which is marked 715P600V 223J 0805. the other orange drops i got are marked 103J and 153J. I got no idea which is which so i assumed that 223 stands for 0.0223 and the same applies to the others. now the problem here is that my tone control has a slight effect from 10 to 1 and then from 1 to 0 it literally cuts all the highs out. Is this a problem with the pot or the cap?
Title: Re: pots, caps, scratching and odd behaviour
Post by: f.sardis on December 19, 2008, 09:18:41 PM
awww man i just realised that audio pots work with tone. i have confirmed however that my orange drop cap is the correct value so nothing i have done wrong, just bad choice of pot for tone apparently.
and so we start desoldering  :lol:
Title: Re: pots, caps, scratching and odd behaviour
Post by: sjwebb90 on December 31, 2008, 11:16:21 AM


First point, don't use WD40 to clean your pots. It is not a cleaner and can make things worse.

Get some proper contact  cleaner such as Servisol, available from Maplins.

Potentiometer naming convention:
A500K = Log
B500K = Linear

Capacitors
223J, its 22 X 10^3 pF, i.e. 22nF or 0.022uF

J = tolerance +/-5%

Try substituting the Linear tone pot for a Log variant.