hey guys, i've been trying to get my guitar working but something's gone terribly wrong with the wiring.
no sound comes from the pickups just a buzzing sound which goes heaps louder when i touch the tone pot.
they're gfs pickups and I used their wiring diagram.
if you can't help from these pictures then maybe someone could point me in the right direction on how to trouble shoot with a multi meter? I am very new to all of this haha.
If they are GFS Humbuckers then they should have 4 wires plus shield/bare wire:
Green = hot, which should connect to the switch
Red + White = series link between the humbucker coils (should be soldered and taped/insulated)
Black = ground
So, you should have the green pickup wires connected to the switch and the black wires plus bare shield wires connected to the back of the pot.
EDIT: Just realised they're probably the GFS '90s type, so the pickup connections will be correct (white hot, red ground), but you'll also need to link the bare shield wires to ground.
The cap on your tone pot should be on the other lug (right, not left) and there should be a ground wire linking the back of the two pots. I'm guessing that green wire on your jack is the ground wire to under the bridge plate? You should connect that to the back of the pot with the other grounds and then run a wire from there to the jack ground. At the moment I can't see any ground connection linking the pickup ground to the output.
Also, it looks like your soldering iron isn't up to temp and many of the solder points could be 'cold' or dry and not conducting properly, you want nice clean shiny solder points. YouTube has some good videos on how to solder to get nice clean joins.
Last edited by WeirdBits; 06-09-2015 at 09:23 PM.
Scott.
Hey xDruichii - sounding like a grounding issue.
Couple of questions:
Looks like there is a green wire attached to the jack - where does that attach to?
What's under the masking tape? What's on the other side of the three way?
Hey thanks heaps for the help guys. Green wire from jack is the ground to bridge.
Yeah my soldering iron is awful, I may have to invest in a new one because it takes a long time to do anything.
I'll try these suggestions tonight. Thanks!
Oh and under the masking tape is the thick bits, bare shield? I think that's what it was called. There's one of them from each pickup.
Yeah, as Weirdbits pointed out those bare wires from the pickups need to be grounded on to the back of one of the pots, a wire connecting the back of the pots and a wire from the back of one the pots to the ground lug on the jack.
The back of the pots is tricky because it can take a lot of heat and patience. I find scraping the coating off the metal with a file or a blade means the solder adheres a lot better.
'As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll.'
When soldering the wires "tin" them first by putting the iron under the bare end and run a bit of solder onto it, then do the same with the back of the pot or lug or whatever, then a dab of solder on the tip of the iron and put it face down on the pot beside the spot you just "tinned" once the tinning melts dip the tinned end of the wire into the solder pool and once the solder flows together remove the iron.
There are heaps of tutes on YT, do a search for Dan Erlewine who has some excellent stuff there. Also you could search YT for " high performance soldering " at one stage I had about 3 hours of it on NTSC video tape in my tech training room for the new starters to get them up to speed
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