Capacitors

[stratkiwi]

I am in the process of changing out the pickups and volume and tone pots in my 96 jackson PS-1, now I want to keep the tone control as I do like having some form of control over the sound of my pickups. As for capacitors I have located a seller who brings in NOS Russian K42Y-2 oil in paper caps and Russian made NOS valves , he has 0.1 and 0.47uf caps available which rating would be better for use with humbuckers as I am going to be putting a SD little 59 humbucker into the neck and SD quarter pounder single coil into the middle to go with the Sh-11 custom custom that is in the bridge. Would 0.47uf be overkill if I attached that to the tone pot which will be a no load pot as I am going to set up the volume pot with a push pull one so I can use it to switch the humbuckers into single coil mode. I have already heard the you don't need a tone control comments and I am going to head down that rabbit hole anyway

[Jay]

0.47 is too 'big' and will cut off a lot of 'desirable' frequencies. I would not go above 0.33uF and not under 0.22uF.

And you can just buy any of these litlle capacitors at Jaycar. You won't hear any difference.

[sizzlingbadger]

You mean 0.047uF right ? that would be pretty dark. I tend to go for 0.022uF with Buckers and 500K pots. I have used 0.015uF in the neck tone control with good results too. Getting the right value is way more important than getting a NOS PIO cap.

[stratkiwi]

Good reason why I asked as I am new to playing with the wiring in guitars and I just didn't know what value capacitors are used on tone pots so I didn't want to go making any stuff ups that could put me off of doing it again, no matter how much I google searched I could not find a straight answer to what I was trying to find out. So a big thanks for putting me straight on what I was wanting to know.

[JustMatt]

I would go for 0.022uf caps on 500k pots. If you do go for NOS, make sure they have been measured before you order them.

We hand test all of ours and find that most have held up well in the 30 odd years of storage but we do get some batches where about 20% have drifetd outside the stated +/-10% tolerance.

Side note - we have about 50 x NOS K42Y-2 caps measuring 0.018uf that we havent binned yet. You are welcome to have a couple.

[Jay]

You mean 0.047uF right ? that would be pretty dark. I tend to go for 0.022uF with Buckers and 500K pots. I have used 0.015uF in the neck tone control with good results too. Getting the right value is way more important than getting a NOS PIO cap.

Good spotting, factor 10 out we were, quite embarrassing (Should have used nF with whole numbers rather than uF).

[stratkiwi]

I would go for 0.022uf caps on 500k pots. If you do go for NOS, make sure they have been measured before you order them.

We hand test all of ours and find that most have held up well in the 30 odd years of storage but we do get some batches where about 20% have drifetd outside the stated +/-10% tolerance.

Side note - we have about 50 x NOS K42Y-2 caps measuring 0.018uf that we havent binned yet. You are welcome to have a couple.

have flicked you through a pm mate but not regarding the 0.018uf caps

[stratkiwi]

Have got some 0.022uf orange drops on the way that I got through trademe, stopped in at shearers on the way home and grabbed a couple of 500k pots I did go to rock shop to buy some machine heads and a pickup for the middle position but the sales guy was so damn rude I said I will think about it and come back, walked out and never went back.

I actually did install the pots last night and reinstalled the existing wires to the same way that it was done in the jackson factory including the way the cap was installed (third lug on tone pot to shell of tone pot).

Something that has been interesting me is the many different ways the caps are installed one was to run one leg from the middle lug of the volume pot to the third lug of the tone pot, the other was to connect to the middle lug of tone pot to the shell of the pot and from lug one to lug three on tone pot and then the way the jackson was done in the factory which is how I installed the temporary cap (0.047uf orange drop). With all these different ways to install the cap what effect does it have does it sound any different?.

I am really interested in learning these different ways and which one works best I even saw a mod online where a bit of wire is run from the middle lug of the volume to the third lug of tone pot as an alternative to a treble bleed kit. So what are your opinions on all these different methods I will be opening up the guitar again in the next week to install the cool rails into the neck position when it arrives and hopefully the 0.022uf cap if they arrive and was thinking about trying the volume to tone pot method.