What gage and type of wire do people use on your electrics

[John Sonksen]

Nearing the final stretch on my next electric and I need some help selecting wire for it. I've got four wire, bareknuckle pickups, alpha vol., tone and five way rotary, and want to make sure I'm using the right gage and core type, (solid vs strand). Can anyone help?

[Peter Wilcox]

I think anything in the low 20's is fine, solid core or stranded, for the low current and short runs in a guitar. Even 28 AWG has a resistance of 0.2 ohms/meter which is negligible in these circuits. I use old pieces of telephone cable, which is 24 AWG solid. You might consider shielded cable or twisting the signal and ground wires together from the volume pot to the jack, though this probably makes little difference in picking up hum from electromagnetic fields.

[Mark Swanson]

Shielded wire is best, a twisted pair is good if you can't use shielded. Stranded wire should be used, never solid.

[Eric Baack]

shielded is good for runs out of the control cavity (which is shielded) Just make sure that you ground 1 end of the shield (not both ends as that creates an antenna). I typically use 22-24 gauge wire in there. I have a couple bags of short chunks of wire that I use for wiring the control cavity.

[John Sonksen]

so when you guys say "shielded wire" you're talking about the Gibson style pushback wire with the braided metal shield? If you only solder it at one end how do you ground the bridge, or are these wires simply running from pot to pot or pot to jack? I was lucky enough to have David King help me with the wiring on my first one, but it was so long ago I'm afraid most of what he showed me has dropped out of my head. Anyone know of any good tutorials that go a bit beyond simple wiring diagrams? I'm terribly uneducated in the world of electronics...

[John Sonksen]

found a good tutorial on Youtube by John Cooper, takes it step by step in detail and slow enough for even me to keep up!

[Jason Rodgers]

For my project, I got some red, green, black, and white 26 gauge stranded copper from Fry's. I'll be using the twisting method, but will shield every cavity as best I can.

[Eric Baack]

so when you guys say "shielded wire" you're talking about the Gibson style pushback wire with the braided metal shield? If you only solder it at one end how do you ground the bridge, or are these wires simply running from pot to pot or pot to jack? I was lucky enough to have David King help me with the wiring on my first one, but it was so long ago I'm afraid most of what he showed me has dropped out of my head. Anyone know of any good tutorials that go a bit beyond simple wiring diagrams? I'm terribly uneducated in the world of electronics...

I run a wire straight from the bridge to ground (a solder clump on the shielding in the control cavity.

[David King]

I use 24AWG but 26 is also fine. My preferred wire is the 19/36 stranded with silver plating and teflon jacket aka mil spec. You can buy it in many gauges and colors off ebay for cheap. The silver plating prefers silver bearing solder. Kester makes a good eutectic solder with 1.5% Ag. You will need a good stripper to deal with the PTFE insulation. An Ideal Stripmaster with the correct gauge blades is the longterm way to go but a nice pair of new Kleins will also work perfectly. Stripmasters are all over ebay.