Hey everyone,
On my recent trip to Taylor guitars, I saw a pretty cool little modification to a multi-meter. Taylor's
Expression System, as well as the electronics in their T-5 model have MOLEX snap connectors on the pickups and harness sensors. In order to test these elements, you need to touch the muti-meter
probes to the two outer lead openings on the male molex connector, which are tiny. A time saving device would be a female molex built into the muti-meter...too bad they don't make them!
A great young guy named Collin at Taylor who was showing me the ins and outs of T-5s had a shop-rigged multi-meter with this feature. Today I had a few extra minutes, so I took a female molex connector, and installed it into my multi-meter. Now I just snap the pickup/sensor molex right into the meter to get an instant reading! This was easy to do, and will save a lot of time on the bench over the years. The photos show the process:
The multi-meter is opened, and I melt away the housing with a soldering iron to make way for the molex connector. Ok, it's a bit sloppy and melted looking...who cares, we're going for function here!
(Besides all the melted plastic helps hold the connector in place.)
Next, the connector is glued to the circuit board and soldered directly to the back
of the probe inputs for ohm readings. I removed the center lead on the molex, as only the two outer ones are needed for this function. Next, the meter is put back together, and there you have it!
You can see in the last shot, an Expression System sensor harness snapped in and reading perfectly! This doesn't interfere with the meter's normal functions by the way.
Please visit my website at http://www.customguitars.com to see more articles on guitar repair and custom built guitars.
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