I've borked up my BKP install and rewire!

[cerpintaxt]

Much to my girlfriend's amusement, I've spent this lovely sunny day rewiring my Vintage SG and installing my BKP's.

1 thing has really peed me off. The Switchcraft SG switch doesnt have a long enough shaft to fit through the body, which I guess must be thicker at the control cavity than a Gibson. So, not sure what I'm going to do about that, but hopefully I might be able to dremel out some of the wood where the switch goes...

Anyway, onto the wiring (which is wired up in the 50's fashion).

Neck pickup (Stormy Monday) and controls work fine and sound amazing.  8)
Bridge pickup doesn't work at all.
On selecting the middle position, both tone pots work fine, neck vol works fine, but the bridge volume pot has a really wierd thing going. It actually works through the middle of the sweep, but yields zero volume either side of this.

I've double checked the wiring schematic and I have wired it up right. Annoyingly, my DMM has packed up so I can't measure anything until I get a new one.

Short of cold solder joints, is it likely anything else is going on? Likely I've borked up the Bridge volume pot? It feels fine, i.e not "sandy".

[badgermark]

Sounds like you might have cooked the pot. Easy to do though, I've fried a fair few myself in the past. When in doubt reflow your joints (touch the iron to them to melt the solder and let it flow into a lovely little blob) and make sure everything is grounded.

When in doubt you could bypass the pot totally to see if anything else is up, just wire it straight to the jack.

[Deadstar]

I had similar problems when doing up my epi les paul.

It's easy enough to take a wood bit and gouge out the wood around the switch by hand, just be careful - especially if your using a dremel it's very easy to go right through without doing much.


First off try what badgermark suggested, if not.
The wiring i most likely either a dodgy solder at some point (if your having trouble with the solder adhering to the pot take a little sandpaper lightly to the area of connection tends to help it flow) or probably more likely you've got the outer braiding exposed which is the shield and is touching another point in the circuit like the body of a pot therefore shorting the circuit.

If its still buggered after that post pics

[cerpintaxt]

Thanks guys. I'll get a dremel then and get to work on routing out some wood for the switch and I might just redo the bridge pickup wiring to be on teh safe side. I think part of the problem was I was using "silver solder" that has quite a high melting point so was finding it hard to get a really good solder joint on the back of the pots. It just didnt flow right  :(

EDIT: Silver solder I bought at Maplins has a lower melting point than their normal stuff :S

[cerpintaxt]

Guess what? I unsoldered and re-soldered my bridge pickup last night and it worked a treat! Turns out the ground connection was at fault. Must have been a cold solder joint. It's a bally bugger trying to solder that huge outer braid to the back of a pot with lead-free solder, whilst at the same time trying not to cook the pot. I have a 30W iron and I was able to leave it on there for a good few seconds though.

[Neemo]

It's always good to have a more powerful soldering iron than what you usually need. You can solder quickly without frying the pots. Of course you need to get the wires where you want almost on the first try but anyone can learn to solder quite quickly with some practice.