Fitting a single coil baseplate

dhaywood67

I'm thinking about trying a baseplate on the bridge pickup of my strat to see what difference it makes and I have a few questions:

1) What difference does the material/thickness used have on the tone/output?
2) Do you 'have' to buy a pre-made plate? Callaham, Alegree, etc
3) If you can make your own do you need to make it wide enough to include hole for the pickup mounting screws?
4) What are the preferred methods for attaching - glue/wax/other?

The pickups installed are Fat 50's

Roland

The baseplate changes the shape of the magnetic field, so steel has a much greater effect than brass, and aluminium has nothing that I can detect. A pre-made plate is easy to buy and use. Those of us with tools will often prefer to make our own because that’s what we do.

The first thing to watch out for is that the metal plate doesn’t touch the pickup’s connections. A lot of pickups have a blob of solder below the pickup where the fine wire of the coils joins the lead cables. The simple thing to do is put insulating tape over the solder joints.

How to fix to the pickup and guitar? The plate doesn’t need to make physical contact with the pickup, just come very close to it. Most cavities are far deeper than the pickup, so you’ll get more effect if the plate is connected to the pickup with glue or double sided tape. I’d do this at first just to find out if you like the effect. @ICBM will have good experience of longevity of different fixing methods.

My own preference is for body mounted pickups. So I screw the plate to the bottom of the cavity, and mount the pickup onto the plate with M3 machine screws (bolts). This guitar has a brass plate at the neck, and mild steel from B&Q under the bridge pickup.

ICBM

I prefer to mount the plate on the bottom of the pickup by using the height screws passing through it. It's best to put some wax or double-sided tape in between the plate and the bottom of the pickup - especially if the poles come down to to where they could touch the plate - to prevent it vibrating and causing microphonics.

Ideally it should be grounded, but it's probably not essential. If you're going to, solder on the ground wire before you attach it to the pickup - I do it by heating the plate over a gas hob until it's hot enough to melt the solder directly onto it, then add a short bit of bare wire and hold it until it cools down.