I've built 3 cbgs so far and haven't grounded any of them. This one, the one I'm moving the bridge on, really needs to be grounded. And I'm not 100% confident I know the right way to do it.

I'm going to take a stab at it though: I need to solder a wire to one of the terminals of the output jack (Or the volume pot?) and that wire needs to be (somehow) soldered to the bridge. Am I right so far?

I saw a Chickenbones video where he drilled a small hole through the neck so that the ground wire from the output jack would touch a guitar string going through a ferule would ground the guitar or something like that.

I'm going to guess that this might be similar.  I drill a hole or make a channel for the ground wire to go from the output jack terminal to the screw that's going to hold the bridge plate to the guitar? Or is there a better way that involves soldering a wire somewhere on the bridge and running that wire through a small hole in the box lid to the output jack terminal?

Or am I all together missing the obvious, easiest way to ground the thing? :)

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  • It would be real easy if you had some copper tape, but if you run a piece of wire from the ground terminal on the jack, you can poke the other end into one of the holes for your bridge screws. 

    • All those methods will work, but i was taught it's better to have your grounds connecting to a continuous wire to the jack to avoid looping effect on the grounds, how correct that is, i'm not sure,  maybe one of our elect. guru's can help with it?

      • In a big scale, a ground loop is when your amp and the PA system are on different grounds in the wall outlets, 2 paths, can make either/both noisy. The "ground lift" button on an amp disconnects the line-out ground from the amp's power ground to help when that happens.

        On the small scale (inside a GIT) your wiring diagram ought to look tree-like. Any point along your ground should have only 1 path to the jack's ground.  If it can take either of 2 paths, you have a loop like the old UHF antennas on tube-type TV's which can pick up RF noise.  Similarly with the hot/red/signal side, any point should have 1 path to the jack's tip or to a ground point, 2 or more paths to the same point makes that old-fashion UHF hoop antenna again.

  • Well I just drilled a hole under the bridge and layed the wire under there flat, like a 1/2 inch of stripped wire so it flattened under the bridge nice and tight when I screwed it on you know?

    I do the same thing with my tailpieces now that they are flat and screwed on the back of the box.

    Seems to work, I found it very difficult to get solder to stick to a screw when I tried that way before.

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