We needed a better way of wax potting our pickups and transformers. Here’s what we did on a budget…
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| Redneck wax potting bath for guitar pickups |
It’s a hacked 300 Watt slow cooker, acquired from Tesco for the grand sum of £10, which contains an inner ceramic liner and holds about 3 litres. The probe is simply a cook’s thermometer (£14 from Barnitts of York).
It takes a little while to warm up, but sits at about 90 degrees all day, which is just about perfect for potting. The temperature can be further tweaked by running the bath on a variac.
Here’s a newly dipped transformer coming out of the soup – a mix of bees wax and parafin wax…
Update: 1 December 2011
The batteries in the cook’s thermometer died, and we really wanted to regulate the temperature and avoid the possibility of overheating the wax, so I built a little temperature controller into an old power supply box. The digital controller was ‘new old stock’ at £30 from ebay, and a 5 amp solid state relay and resistance thermometer came from Farnell to complete the setup. It works very well!
