Wiring a humbucker into a SSS Strat

[Simon Barden]

Are the only wires you've removed and re-soldered the ones for the bridge pickup?

The wiring colours (though they don't matter as long as everything is connected correctly) are a bit confused. It's easier if black wires are kept for grounds and other colours (white here) for the signal paths as it makes it easier to follow. Here they're all mixed up. On the volume pot, the wires leading off to the output jack have white as ground and black as the signal cable. Just check that on the output jack the black wire goes to the tip connection and the white wire to the sleeve connection. If not, that's your main problem and they need to be swapped over at one end.

There is also no dedicated ground connection from the back of the first tone pot to the back of the volume pot. There looks to be a ground link between the two tone pots. Whilst this can work, because the foil shielding on the pickguard normally provides a decent connection between pots, if any of the nuts holding the pots on become loose, then that connection is lost, so I'd always run a ground wire between all the pots.