Pickups are Artist Bullbuckers. Instructions say to solder white and red together, which I've done. Yellow is hot, black ground.
But what is the extra black wire for? It's been taped off so I assume I don't need to worry about it, but the Artist info doesn't really explain what it is.
I would wait for Simon to come online and confirm as he seems to be the resident expert on these things. I am betting from all my research this is the bare ground wire that is taped up and need to be grounded.
The bridge info page on the Artist site is clearer -https://www.artistguitars.com.au/buy/16966 2nd thick black wire is ground.
Yes, as mrpearson says, I'd expect this to be the braided shield wire for the cable that's been taped or heat-shrinked. I'd have expected them to have left a small section of bare end. Other pickup makers would have wrapped the bare shield wire around the signal ground wire, soldered the ends together and then put some heat shrink over the wound wires to prevent it from accidentally touching a signal connection and causing silence.
Just cut back about 1cm of the blue-circled wire's insulation and it should be obvious that it's the braided screen wire inside. If so, it just gets soldered to ground on the back of a pot. It doesn't need to be wrapped around the black wire - that's just done for neatness and convenience.
What you will need to do is put some insulating tape or heat shrink over the bare ends of the soldered together white and red wires. The pickup signal passes through these wires and you don't want the ends to accidentally get grounded otherwise you'll end up with a single coil sound, not a humbucker sound, from the pickups.
Thank you. I had taped off the red/white, but it was easier to feed it through untaped I found. I've got my harness ready to go just need to find time to connect it all.
This is the second time I've tried this though. Process has been going for a while, cause of lack of time.
Well I finally got around to doing this - again - and - again - something isn't right. I was sure I had eliminated all the issues I had previously, but it's still just buzzinf incessantly no matter what I do.
This guitar has now been out of action for almost a year and it's really giving me the shits.
Are you positive it's the guitar and not a bunch of leads and pedals that are lying all over each other?
Try eliminating all other leads except for one direct connection to the amp
Constant buzzing but with sound and the controls all functioning normally is due to having the signal and ground wires swapped at the output jack, though it can be down to a bad ground connection somewhere in the wiring harness.
If you've got a multimeter, check if there's continuity between the metal nut on the outside of the output jack and the back of a pot. If not, it's likely the ground and signal connections are swapped on the jack. Easy to do.