Onboard bass preamp troubleshooting

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Hey guys, I'm a bass guitar builder and have run into a wiring problem on one of my customer's bass so tought I'd ask the electronics Experts over here :)

I've installled an Aguilar OBP-3 preamp inside of a Jazz Bass clone I built, I must have installed about a dozen of these preamps in the last couple of years without a hitch, unfortunately i'm now stuck, here's the schematic used

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As can be seen I added a passive tone pot to it, I've also wired a few of these with this schematic in the past without a problem, the difference this time is that i used a Fender 250k/500k dual concentric pot for both the volume and the tone controls

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I essentially wired all the ground wires to one star ground and sent that to the jack. Frm the tone pot drawing, i soldered the cap to one lug then the other bit of the cap to the casing (same side casing as the lugs making sure not to touch lower casing for the other part of the pot) and then sent a ground wire from there to the star ground.

Here's the problem, absolutely everything in the circuit works fine as it should work besides the tone control. From turned up full on to about 1/3 of a turn nothing happens to the sound (tone doesn't work) then once turned the pot back to that 1/3 the sound goes dead on the bass, volume shuts completely off.

The top part of the pot (volume knob) works fine, just the lower part of the pot, the tone doesn't work

Any ideas anyone? I'm at wits end here and need to send this bass back to its owner...:(
 
Tie a voltage source across the element (ie. 9v battery) and measure the voltage on the wiper and V- with a VOM or a scope.
By actuating the control, the voltage should go up and down smoothly.
If it is erratic or suddenly jumps high or low then it has a bad element.

Good Luck !!

jer :)
 
Phil,

There are three options:
- either bad pot,
- or bad capacitor,
- or ground wire not connected to the ground.
At least two of these three options can be asily checked with a cheap digital multimeter (set to Ohms measurement). In many cases you can also measure capacitors with such a meter.
There is one more possibility to check the pot: since this is a double pot, you can switch wires between sections (tone <-> volume) and see whether volume still works after the wires were switched (and whether tone control started working suddenly) :).

Mark
 
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