Gallery
Hufschmid Tantalum – The Celtic Mica
Oct 07, 2025
This unique creation is crafted from a single piece of impeccably quartersawn, highly figured Sapele mahogany for both the body and the neck, topped with a highly figured Swiss flame maple from Le Jura. The fingerboard is Crelicam ebony. A defining feature is the intricate Celtic-knot engraving on the top, inspired by my grandmother’s Scottish and Welsh heritage—bold, historic, and personal.
The guitar features custom laser-engraved Lace Alumitone pickups, fully noiseless and comfortable across many playing styles. Inside the control cavity, I created a copper verdigris finish to bring artistry to a place that’s usually hidden. This model blends craftsmanship, personal history, and technical innovation.
A centerpiece of this instrument is a NOS Soviet KSG-2G silver-mica capacitor (0.027 µF ±5%, 500 V). It sits in a dedicated chamber under plexiglass so the player can see it. In my wiring it’s used only in the tone control circuit, where the value is what matters.
About the capacitor:
The KSG-2G series was built in the USSR for high-reliability military and industrial electronics—radio, radar, and communications—where stability was critical. As a hermetically sealed silver-mica part, it offers exceptionally low loss, tight tolerance, and long-term stability, and it’s engineered far beyond the requirements of a guitar circuit (with a 500 V rating). It’s often confused online with paper-in-oil types like K40Y-9, but KSG is mica, not PIO.
This guitar is part of a small series I’m building that showcases this historical component in the same dedicated, visible way—treating it as both an engineering artifact and an aesthetic signature.
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