Aluminium under a pickup?

FX_Munkee

Bear with me.
I have a cunning plan (M'Lord) for mounting the humbuckers in my latest project.
They're going to be body mounted (for aesthetics) but I want them to be a bit adjustable.
So the plan is:-
take the #3-48 screws that fit them, and grind off the thread from the top 2mm so that it will spin once completely threaded through the pickup legs.
Drill and tap a narrow piece of alu strip to go in the cavity under the pickup so that the leg screws can go into that.
Add springs/tube, foam etc and adjust to taste.
Profit?

Anyway, are there any issues with having aluminium in that close a proximity to the pickup? I remember eddy currents but that's a switched magnetic field IIRC.

ecc83

Yes, ally will have eddycurrents in it when the strings are struck but I doubt the effect will be great or audible.

Bit of "engineering" advice? Use extruded ally plate (you could probably get enough free from a d glazing company for 10 pups!) It is harder than pure ally and will take a thread more cleanly and be less likely to strip. Best lube? WD-40.

An alternative would be a hard brass or even better, phosphor bronze. Very good would be a non-magnetic stainless steel but it is a pig to machine!

Dave.

FX_Munkee

Thanks for the reply.
The couple of pieces of ally I have lying around are extruded plate.
Shouldn't need lube to tap a #3-48 UNC thread in ally If I cock that up I think I will revoke my Engineering Apprenticeship
Guess I'll just get on with it and see if it does effect the sound. It's for an '80's hair metal kramer so it's actually debatable that this matters anyway
Good call on the brass. Don't think I've got any knocking about though.

ICBM

I think it's unlikely to make a difference on a humbucker because they already have a metal baseplate, so any additional eddy current effect will be masked by it. The magnetic field of a humbucker seems to wrap around quite tightly under the pickup anyway.

It might make a difference on a single coil with vertical rod magnets if the aluminium is very close. I would expect it to take off a bit of top-end. The large shielding sheets Fender put under the pickguards on 60s Strats definitely do, although it's fairly subtle. The full gold-anodized aluminium pickguards make quite a big difference.