Wire
Excuse this detour of an introduction, but if you got this far, I am sure you will not mind some more of my Gelaber. Otherwise, jump down a little further and into the next headline.
What you need
soldering iron
solder
wire
soldering grease
a steady hand
Disclaimer
When I am not doing fun stuff in my sparetime, I work as a computer scientist - which is mostly fun, too. I am sure that many developers out there would agree that software project setups can be painful tasks. Using tools and extending them to fit your use-case is where the fun starts. It comes as this funny misconception that people think any computer scientist would intuitively know how to help them with their everyday tech struggles.
But hell, nowadays the world is tech. Not sure what a dentist would say if you asked her about the pain in your back. Yes, dentists work with bodies, but they mostly study mouths. You can’t know every solution to every problem. The space of problems in any field is just too vast. In the end, most tech professionals are just kind enough to help with those daily struggles, because that’s what you learn to become - a solver of problems.
It’s also fair to say that tech people may have a certain preposition into tech problems even outside our field of daily work. Still, that doesn’t imply that we intuitively have the knowledge to explain why your OS doesn’t boot or why all data on your harddrive is suddenly corrupted.
I am sure this issue can easily be transferred to other professions, as we are all driven by our own curiosity and motivation to expand on it.
Here is where I going with this:
Yes, I wanted to build a guitar. And no, wiring it did not interest me at all.
How to wire a guitar
As you might’ve guessed, this still isn’t really what the headline states, but carry on.
Why am I writing all of this? Well, for one I am trying to make an excuse for knowing so little about electrical engineering, that I don’t even want to try to explain how my guitar was wired. Secondly, it’s still an essential part of making a guitar and I promised to flesh out the entire build. But most importantly, I am hoping that someone, who knows more about wiring, will read this. If you do, write a post and get in touch. We can host your instructions here, instead of this excuse of a documentation. Of course, you may also see this as an invitation to write about something else entirely, even outside of guitar making.
For the lack of my own instruction, check out the video below. It illustrates the soldering of a similar setup.
Let me shout out my good friend Freddy again, who took it upon himself to take care of wiring this guitar. Maybe I can encourage him to write about it some day. Also, thanks a lot Heinz for providing a blueprint of how to run the cables.
Now, here are some images of Freddy “der alte Lötkolben” doing his thing! Looks pretty darn cool.
Unfortunately, we were missing a capacitor to finish the entire setup. So once Freddy was done with the initial magic, we hit up Aurora, who helped us finalize it all. Another huge thanks to her. Apart from filling in the missing piece, she also proved some amazing diagnostic skills.
With all that excitement, which I had built up while watching, I plugged in the guitar for the first time and... nothing. Only a slight humming would be put out by the amp. It was already several hours past my planned departure for driving to Max’ place. I had worked long through the previous night and all through the current day, so that I could head-off for our weekend of writing and jamming on the finished guitar. Now, we almost had to call it a day. Just as Freddy announced his departure, Aurora figured out that the input wires were soldered to the input jack in reversed polarity. A quick fix later, the day was saved and the guitar worked. HOOOOLYYYYYY SHIIIIIIT!
While I absolutely admire the skills of everyone involved in this process, I realized I didn’t really want to gain a deeper understanding of what makes it all work. At least not at that point.
Sure, I know roughly how an electrical current runs, which is from positive to negative polarity... right? I actually did a quick web search, when writing this, just to make sure I am not saying anything stupid. Now, here is this dude, Jon Cantu, on Quora, saying “[...] negative to positive or positive to negative, it doesn’t matter! As long as you don’t change directions in the middle of your circuit analyses your calculations will be correct.”.
Yeah right, I’ll shut up now.
