Fretter pandemic check-in - let us know how you are!

[duhvoodooman***]

BTW: Happy Birthday DVM!

Same back atcha, BC!

Glad to hear you had a mild case....

Looks like a fun project, Vood - good to hear from you! You WILL, I hope, inform us of your reaction to the finished project...

Finished it up today. Comments and photos here:

http://byocelectronics.com/board/vie...497015#p497015

DVM, with the shielding paint, can you connect it to the shielding on the pickguard somehow? The static noise from pickguards during the winter drives me nuts.

Yeah, that's possible and often done to maximize EMF shielding and minimize electrical noise, especially for guitars with single-coil pickups. I've done that on this guitar using the wire that comes up from the pickup cavity under the hardtail bridge to ground it (and through it, the strings and tuners). I added a strip of conductive copper tape under the very bottom edge of the pickguard and overlapping its shielding foil, so that it contacts that same grounding wire.

The bad news is that I doubt that it will have any real effect on the problem you're referring to, which arises from the build-up of static charge on the TOP of the pickguard during very dry winter weather. I've found two ways to address that:

1) PRETTY GOOD: You're probably already familiar with this one. Rub the top of your pickguard with a fabric softener/anti-cling dryer sheet like Bounce or Cling-Free. It'll do a good job suppressing static charge build-up for a few days, then you'll have to do it again.

2) BEST: Get yourself a good humidifier for the room where you usually play, and try to maintain a relative humidity of 45 - 50%. This works wonders. I strongly recommend a good evaporative humidifier like THIS ONE. Stay away from the ultrasonic kind if you have any significant amount of hardness in your tap water, because the dreaded "white dust" ends up on EVERYTHING. Unless you want to feed the thing distilled water, which gets pretty expensive! Vaporizers aren't much better because the hardness minerals just end up accumulating in the heater portion of the unit and are a maintenance headache. With the evaporative humidifiers, you just toss the filter pad when it gets fouled with mineral build-up and install a new one.