Squier Mascis - Grounding?

[Danley]

A Squier VM body has two wires screwed to the body to ground the shielding and a single hole for a wire to ground the bridge cups.

My Mascis body actually has no place for ground wires such as the below, and no hole for the bridge ground (though pictures I find online show the VM-style grounding on some bodies.) How was grounding accomplished on these - were the bridge and shielding all grounded somehow by the anodized pickguard?

[timtam]

I've seen Squier Mascis bodies with paint shielding and some with owner-added copper foil (that may or may not have had paint underneath). The possible need for the physically-wired grounds to each cavity (as on paint-shielded VMs) probably relates to the fact that shielding paint never measures zero ohms between any two points, as copper foil does. The paint is actually spec-ed that way, ie resistance per unit area, eg 50 ohms/10mm^2. Thickness also affects resistance. So the wire ensures that at least at its contact point in the cavity it will be at zero ohms to ground, and low resistance nearby.

The uncertainty is whether that very small resistance across the paint (with / without cavity ground wires) makes any difference whatsoever to shielding performance in a guitar. We have no obvious objective ways to test that. AFAIK there is no hard reason to expect that zero ohms is necessary. So the added ground wires may be superfluous ... or not ... paint shielding may be equally good, or equally bad, without them. When dealing with paint-shielded guitars, I do tend to make sure it has those cavity ground wires. But I am not sure if it would be just as good without them, or if it would be better to add full copper shielding (with only one ground connection needed to ensure zero-ohms continuity all the way to the farthest cavity), which is what I do in an unpainted guitar.

If the Mascis pickguard is conductive, it is grounded by the rim of the output jack. If that pickguard then makes contact with the bridge post bushings, that would be sufficient to ground the bridge / strings / trem (as long as no Graphtech saddles added). I guess that contact could be less than 100% certain to be present, so maybe there was another link ?