So I rescued this kit guitar from a kid in another city who’d not realized that he would have to wire it up. Not a problem. I thought. Anyway, I wound a pair of humbuckers, and I build a test guitar so I know that they are functional, wired up the controls as per a 50s wiring diagram and YouTube tutorial, painstakingly and frustratingly loaded all into the guitar cavity and nothing. It’s fair to say that I am very much disappointed. I am including a picture of the controls circuit and if anyone has a few minutes, could you kindly check my work. I am more than willing to post more, detailed pics if necessary. When I touch the metal housing on the cord, dead quiet, natural state is slight hum and no noise, no switching noise, no pot scratching, when I touch the metal housing on the switch, all kinds of ungrounded noise. That’s all I got right now. Thanks to any responders...
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Kind of hard to figure out the wiring with the shielded wires. Do you have a schematic or diagram? I am also not seeing any grounding wire for the bridge.
If you don't have any test equipment, you could plug a guitar cord into an amp and touch the tip of the other end with your finger to make hum. If that works, then plug the cable into the jack you wired up and touch hot lead of the jack with your finger, is there hum? If not, either you didn't touch the right point or something is shorted to ground at that point. Work your way around as much as possible to see what you can find out.
Once you get as far as you can with that you could try tapping on pickups one at a time with a piece of steel, and see if that makes a sound. If not, you probably have to start unsoldering connections and try testing sub-sections of the circuitry a bit at a time.
If you have a DVM you can do a lot with it too, only by means of measuring resistance instead of listening for hum. If you have a scope, then even more tests can be done.
Once you get as far as you can with that you could try tapping on pickups one at a time with a piece of steel, and see if that makes a sound. If not, you probably have to start unsoldering connections and try testing sub-sections of the circuitry a bit at a time.
If you have a DVM you can do a lot with it too, only by means of measuring resistance instead of listening for hum. If you have a scope, then even more tests can be done.
This is the diagram that video is based on. Both pickups are grounded at their respective volume pots.
My switch has ground and signal reversed from the video. I’ve got it sorted I think. Thanks all. Hope this works.
And it worked, signal goes in and out of the switch on the plug side, ground is by itself on the other side with the solid block. Should have figured this, but I wasn’t paying attention. Thanks again.
Congratulations!
I recently changed the pickups and tone caps in my Agile AS820 (a South Korean ES-335 look-alike), so I have an idea what you just went through. It took me a couple of weeks to get the job done, including time spent building a couple of special tools for the job, and more time spent ordering a second set of pots after I found out mine had too short a threaded section to come through the wooden guitar top. 😱
The most useful special tool turned out to be a dummy 1/4" plug soldered to a length of wire, with its base ground down so that it would go through the jack mounting hole in the guitar top. That let me fish the guitar output jack into place once I'd stuffed the wire harness back into the body of the guitar.
In the end it was well worth it, as the OEM pickups always sounded too dull. The new Seymour Duncan's have brought the guitar to life.
-Gnobuddy
Just went thru a couple of same issues myself - I used dental floss and a study wiree to get a thru correct cavities. A real PIA
Yeah. Just stick some sufficient lengths of yarn on anything that's going to fall into the geetaar body before removing the lock screws.
Best regards!
Best regards!
Too expensive. Some turns of isolating tape will do also, if not better, 'cause it is sticky. In Addition one can bend the yarn's end back and stick it between two adjacent layers.
Best regards!
Best regards!
I didn't try heat-shrink tubing, but several posts I found online recommended "airline tubing" (stretchy synthetic rubber tubing used for blowing air bubblesinto fish-tanks, like this: Marina Airline Tubing, 20 Feet: Amazon.ca: Pet Supplies
So I got some, but I didn't find it very useful. It did work well to fish the pot shaft through the hole in the guitar body - but once the pot was in place, the pot mounting washers and nuts could not slide over the fat part of the tube, where it was stretched over the pot shaft.
Basically I had to pull the airline tubing off before I could actually get the nuts and washers onto the pot, and this would mean the pot falling back into the guitar body, unless it was close enough to an F-hole to let you get the fingers of one hand behind the pot. So, for me, the "airline tubing" technique only worked on one or two of the four pots.
What did work for me was tying a length of thin string to a Popsicle stick, fishing the other end of the string into the guitar body, pulling it out through an F-hole, and tying it to a pot shaft.
The string worked for all the pots, but it wouldn't work for the guitar's output jack. That's where the special tool came in incredibly useful - pull the cover off a 1/4" mono plug, grind or cut or file away the base so the entire plug can pass through the jack mounting hole, solder a length of wire to the jack. Fish the plug through the jack mounting hole into the guitar body, fish it back out through the F-hole, plug it into the guitar's output jack, push the jack into the F-hole, pull gently on the wire to guide the output jack into place in the body. It worked very well.
-Gnobuddy