Extending hookup cables

E

eviltobz

New member
I've recently scored myself a set of duncan designed HB102 pups to get a feel for the JB/Jazz pairing without forking over toooo much cash. The bridge pup has a rather short hookup cable and the guitar that I want to put it needs to connect it to a toggle switch in the typical les paul location so it needs a whole bunch more wire.

I have some suitable wire from a stewmac build your own pup kit that I can extend it with, but I was wondering if i may introduce problems if I just try to attach it on where the current wire stops due to the way that the ground connection tends to wrap around the rest of the cables in a shielding kind of way.

I can look into dismantling the pup to completely replace the wire but that will be a lot of hassle if there aren't likely to be major interferencey problems cropping up.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

You can get those little heat shrink tubes radio shack sells to cover up the exposed wire/solder joint. Inexpensive and a simple solution.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

the big thing that i see happen when people just extend the leads and cover with heat shrink tubing is they can no longer route the cables through the holes in the body. Now if this is a strat or something that has huge routes no problem. But if you have tiny holes that the wires are routed through you might wind up with not being able to pull the wires through.

Replacing the wires at the bobbin does take a little bit of surgery but isnt real hard to do. If your decently familiar with soldering and the pickup assembly its actually the better option.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

I hate soldering cos I'm really bad at it. Not aided by the fact that I don't have a decent workspace in which to do it. The pup has a cover that would need removing and I'd need to melt off a bunch of wax potting gunk to get to the connections so I really want to avoid that if I can. The point about getting a chunky cable through thin holes is a goodun though, I'll have a check on that before going any further. My main concern (apart from that one now) is just about borking the wire's shielding where the two cables join leading to a noisy or interference prone pup, but so far no-one seems to think that's a problem.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

ah ok I follow yah there. the covers and the wax can be a pain in the butt. Well then in that case the best thing you can do if you can is stagger where you make the splices so that you dont have a big knot of them all trying to go through at the same time.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

Oh and a side note to all this. When you do the splices you dont need 2 inches of heat shrink tubing over the connections. Keep them short. You just need them long enough to cover the connection and a little bit more so they stay in place.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

Edge has some good advice. You can stagger them or you can cut the original wire short enough so the extension bundle is somewhere under the pickup or just before the routing hole.
 
Re: Extending hookup cables

TheLivingDead said:
Edge has some good advice. You can stagger them or you can cut the original wire short enough so the extension bundle is somewhere under the pickup or just before the routing hole.
Click to expand...

+1.
Just feed your extension wire through the routing holes. You don't need to worry that you may have a large joint where the two wires were joined.
 
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