Originally Posted by peterh
Hey Doc, I'll pick up a new set of feeler gauges tomorrow. I have a set of my dad's old ones marked 6 to 32 but I don't know if thats hundreds of an inch or something else. That measurement of .020" - is that on the open strings or when pressing down on the 3rd fret?
On another note, I put all the wiring together tonight and ..... it makes a hell of a buzz. I've had some conversations going on another thread about pickup wiring and I thought I understood what I should be doing but obviously not. The volume is working fine - roll it back and the buzz decreases, roll it forward and it gets louder up to a point and then it gets pretty quiet right near the top end. I tried tapping the pickups with a screwdriver to see if anything was working and I might have been getting something from the bridge pickup but don't think I heard anything from the neck pup.
I'm wondering if I still misunderstood the grounding of the copper shielding. I used the outer braid from a piece of wire as the ground from the bridge, soldered it to the copper in the cavity and then soldered it to the pot case. Should I have used coated wire instead of bare mesh?
Here's a couple shots of the control panel wiring. Yeah... it's a bit messy but I haven't soldered much lately. All the connections are solid as far as I can tell. Anything look totally amiss?
Yep, the measurement of .020 inch is on the open strings, it's Fender's standard specification for all their Strats, Teles, and other six-string guitars, except Basses, I think they use a different spec on their Basses.
I get a similar buzzing issue with my strat, when I did the bridge-grounding I soldered one end of a piece of insulated wire to a suitable point on the back of the volume control, and the other end was soldered to the trem-spring claw on the back of the guitar body, since you have a Telecaster style guitar, you just use a piece of insulated wire to ground the bridge to the volume control as per how I did with my strat, but instead of soldering the other end to the spring claw, you just strip about an inch or so of the insulation off the end, twist the strands together, and then put that underneath the bridge plate before attaching the bridge with the mounting screws, to check if you have properly grounded the bridge you can use a multimeter set to low ohms, you should see close to zero ohms if you touch one multimeter probe to the bridge and the other probe to the sleeve connection on the output jack.
There's at least four possibilities for no sound from the neck pickup, the neck pickup could be open-circuit, there could be a bad solder-joint, or a bad pickup selector switch contact, or the neck pickup could be short-circuited somewhere.
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