Cannot get harness out of NS Starfire I bass. Tips? Tricks?

lungimsam

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The airline tubing worked really well. It was very easy.
Once everything was installed I checked and the circuitry was dead silent. No noise. Success! Tapping on the pole pieces confirmed signal.
Then I installed the strings and some noise came back. Cannot understand why. Maybe since strings are unshielded they pick up and add noise?
I checked for continuity and everything fine, so no broken solder joints and the circuitry is intact.
I will try copper shielding the pup cavity and see if that helps.
Pots are Emerson Pro CTS and work great. Nice even sweeps throughout.
Bass sounds great, just have to figure a way to get rid of residual noise now.
 

Nuuska

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hello

Sounds like your strings are not grounded - with ohmmeter you can check the connection between strings & output jack ground - should be very close to zero.
 

SFIV1967

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Then I installed the strings and some noise came back. Cannot understand why.
Sounds like your strings are not grounded.
The bass has a ground wire coming from the bridge (the little hole) and going to the volume pot. Question is if it is correctly connected to the bridge.

33688101428_3677ee635e_k.jpg



Ralf
 
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lungimsam

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Thats a pic with harness and pup removed from before I got the new harness done up. I just stuck the wire end in the pup cavity to easily get to it later. That wire been replaced.

As for new harness:
I have connectivity/continuity on ohmeter (reads 0.9 and makes audible tone) from strings to jack so that means wiring good? So a shielding issue at this point?
 
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lungimsam

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According to the criteria of that article (and thanks for the article, it was the clearest explanation of ground loops I have read so far) I don't think I have a ground loop. I don't have shielding tape on the bass, so no pots not touching that. And when I trace my finger on the ground wiring route, it terminates at output jack ground lug. The route doesn't go back on itself that I can tell.

Bridge ground wire goes to back of tone pot. I tried it on V pot and also grnd lug on jack and made no diff. Same results.

I will try shielding the pup cavity and attaching to grnd and see if that helps.

Weird thing is that it was silent until I installed strings. Which makes me think a solder joint broke, but I have continuity on ohmmeter. Puzzling.
 

lungimsam

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Wow! Can you explain the process and how you changed things around? Looks very interesting.
 

edwin

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Wow! Can you explain the process and how you changed things around? Looks very interesting.

Well, it's been a long journey for this bass. It's a '67 that I got in 1994 for $275 because they were really unfashionable. It started life as a single pickup (neck) bass. The first set of mods were installing a pair of Bartolini triple coil pickups that were sized for replacement for the Westerly Guild humbuckers. Each pickup had three coils, two of which have magnets, so it's like a mini Alembic series setup per pickup and then a Badass I bridge. I played it like that with various preamps (try getting a Bart preamp with batteries through those f-holes!). It sounded really nice. The next step was the small door on the back. I tried to explain to the luthier that I wanted a very large door so I could properly shield it and have access to all the pots, etc., but he didn't really understand and made the door too small. Eventually, I got a very early pair of Dark Star pickups and went with that along with a ACG 01 preamp. That also sounded pretty cool.

After that, Marko Ursino in Scandinavia was experimenting with building Alembic style bridges, so he built me a bridge, sustain block, tailpiece set (and was later requested to cease and desist). It worked nicely. A little while after that, I found an early 70s set of Alembic Series pickups (cool caramel ones with trapezoidal magnets and 800 ohm resistance! They sounded amazing, but were a bit noisy and eventually broke) along with a bag of Series parts with a preamp board, also from the early 70s from a different seller. I had the pickups installed and took the bag of parts and turned it into a functioning preamp. This was all still through the small door, so finally I took it back to the luthier and showed him pictures of various Alembic modded Starfires and this time he got it. It worked out perfectly because the preamp card fits perfectly on the small door and then I can open up the whole bottom half of the bass to really have access to the whole thing and now it's properly shielded. The final mod was to have Alembic install their own bridge, tailpiece, sustain block in there. The next move is to get a new fingerboard because the frets are cut slightly out of tune, which makes it impossible to get the whole bass to play in tune. I'm thinking of having Alembic do it and maybe get LEDs!

So, that's it in a nutshell, although there were other side experiments along the way. Lots of holes drilled here and there, but the bass sounds wonderful and is a pleasure to play.

Oh yeah, here's a picture of it with the Dark Stars that Guild posted on their website, although they got my name wrong. I appreciated the endorsement, but they didn't even give me a free bass!

207972.jpg
 

Happy Face

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What a journey!

I still have the ACG/Darkstar pairing in my red JS-II though I've never been totally happy with the quality of the assembly.

PITA on the fingerboard. I had the same issue in my current Rick. I wish i had installed LEDs but the luthier was racing along. Turned out beautifully, though.

It never ends, doesn't it?
 
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