Where can I learn how to read Schematics, and circuit diagrams?

yeah...um.... I forgot what i was gonna ask... oh yeah... Right I've been intrested in making my own amps and effects and stuff, but I never did electronics at any of my schools... SO can Anyone tell if there is anywhere on-line where I Can learn how to read schematics and circuit diagrams?... My maths is very good, and my physics is good... So I dont fear any equations or such like evil....
Any begginer Amp projects out there? I dont really want to undertake something too complicated just yet... oh and a low power rating...
oh yeah, one more thing, what about winding my own pick ups? I'd very much like to try that...
Thank you!

for the winding of the pickups, only Brian MAY, queen's guitarist, has tried to do it without a machine, and he dropped the stuff halfway. I think that you can find pretty good pickups for a cool price, since a lot of the pickups winding has to be perfect to make it sound good.

I'll have to get back to you on the schematics tutorials.

For pickup winding, you might want to contact James8831 from this website. The fact that he casully mentioned "thousands of turns" of wire should serve as a warning of what you're in for. Oy!!

Check out http://www.ax84.com and the links it provides. Very good source of information I believe.

The general when beginning with stuff like this is, start small, and work your way up to the amps. Start with a "simple" stompbox or something. It's less dangerous, and will cost you less if you screw it up. ;)


Greetz, TK

in guitar world magazine, (USA) there's an ad in the classified that sells you stompboxes plans made with stuff you can find at your local radio shack, that could be a start...

http://www.londonpower.com/books.htm

That's another link with some VERY useful books.

As a side note, Kevin O'Connor is the designer/builder of the 0 to 10 Watt adjustable power amplifier.

Thanks guys... I'll probably get back to ya with some more questions...
Lord: oh yeah, I know it takes thousands of turns (or you could do some funkty stuff, like putting a resistor in, to reduce the number of turns).... Last year I did a little project on transformers .... Cos quite frankly i was lazy, and thought winding a piece of wire hundreds and hundreds of times would be less taxing than having to do anything complicated... Oh how wrong i was... but it's not so bad when you're watching tv which passes the time a lot quiker... but you'll remember a whole vocab of forgotten profanities as you relize you just put 50 turns round the card that just meant to hold the thing together....
Anyway, there's a local man who winds his own pickups, and sells them for about £30 which isn't bad... Everyone is going hysterical over them... aparantly symore-duncans aren't a patch on them... but they're fragile... Any thoughts on this point?

Oh yeah, I'm getting an FM radio transmitter for guitar... can play through my amp and have all the radio's in the house set to it, so you get a surround sound... cool eh? oh yeah, you can also put your guitar through the amp for a clean tone, then put the out put through a pedal and through the transmitter (it's floor mounted.. I hate the portable jobbies and having to get batterires for them), and so you get a mixture of your clean sound and you'r wah, or flanging or whatever.... Why is this post so long, I was just gonna say thanks.. anyway, back to work...

Take another look through these threads:

http://www.guitartricks.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2593
http://www.guitartricks.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2021

Manufacturers fill the windings with somehting like varnish or beeswax to keep the wires in place.

And no, a resistor is no substitute for turns of wire. You need windings to interact with the magnetic field.

thanks.. read through them... Um... your exations is pretty helpful... But I dont know why you're using emf as opposed to your average voltage (sorry, but i hate emf, everything I work with emf involves "lost volts" and other tedious factors)...
I read your thread on pick ups,... um... it's great, but I've kinda gone past this (please,I dont mean to sound arogant at all)... but you've mentioned something I've completly forgotten about... sheilding, and more importantly attenuation... What processes happen with you average e.m. radation? (I feel right at home with this :D... but I'm intrested in what happens)...
Cos with you're X-rays you got your: photo electric, compton scattering, and pair production... but the last two are pretty high energy stuff... I thing pair production needs a wave of a minimun energy of 1.2 mev... Cos yiou get all kinds of funky stuff goin' on, like suddenly you get enrgy converted to masss.... and you get one electron and one positron (which is anihalted by a nieghbour, if your worried abotu what happens to all energy)... So it comes back to good ol' E= mCsquared, you gotta have enough energy ... that's another thing that equation! Everyone looks at you like your some kinda genius when ya say it... but really it's about as complicated as working out "If a car travels at 60miles per hour, how far does it travel in a minute"....
I read you profile , your job sounds pretty cool... Certainly gives you some cool gismos to take home from work (not that i would condone theft :))...
hmmm... I've just read this through... Why have i started rambling these days... and myspelling's getting alot worse.. not that it was any good in the first place...

I used E in Ohm's Law equation to avoid the confusion involved with the use of uppercase or lowercase V or I.

It used to be conventional usage that lowercase letters denoted AC terms and uppercase letters denoted DC terms.

This all went out the window with the recognition that a lot of the units are named after scientists and physicists, so the use of capital letters is called for.

Electrical shielding is an issue because the amplifiers we use usually have high-impedance circuitry which is susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI). The problems start because, in RF terms, the 'ground' at your guitar jack is not the same as the 'ground' at the AC mains outlet. Anytime you have an oscillating EM wave acting on an impedance, you have voltage potential difference, which may be big enough, and at at a low enough frequency for the amp to work with.

Magnetic shielding is also an issue because of the transformers and other line-frequency interference sources that cause the infamous hum problems we see in so many posts.

The instructions at http://www.guitarnuts.com/ have this stuff nailed down pretty well, including ways to protect players from electrocution due to faulty mains.

[Edited by Lordathestrings on 12-26-2001 at 11:45 PM]

Hi all,

educatedfilm I think that paying your local guy $30 for pickups is a bargain!! :> As you've wound transformers i guess that you know the sort of pain you're in for with pickups,but
in case you must wind your own, Jason Lollar sells some great stuff for pickup winding on his site at http://lollarguitars.com/
- including books,magnets,bobbins (well top and bottom plates anyway) ..etc,etc.

I got lucky really in doing the ones i did and hit the right style by luck - I'm an amateur (boy am I!), but i think it gives you a lot of satisfaction to say "yeah i wired that/wound those" _who the hell did That Leo fender think he was any way :)LOL- Madly.

I found this book helpful -"Audio Amplifier Projects" by RA Penfold -for making amp parts and schematics. I don't think i'm up to some of your levels on electronics - Especially not Lordathestrings, who has sent me back to school.

educatedfilm:

I myself have taken a few years of education in the electrical industry. These courses have included transistor technology. The math is quite simple ie. the gain in a transistor, but for myself, I have also looked at building an amp for say my car stereo...but decided not to due to the labour involved. Maybe I'm just lazy, but someone else has done the work and I think it is just easier to buy the darn thing.

However, if you are interested in a hobby and spending some time to do it, best of luck to ya. I don't remeber the site but there are some on the site. One showed the schematic of how to wire it and a list of the materials (very specific) as to the equipment required for the particular project.