AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

[Skybone]

My new set of Crawlers arrived yesterday, so I set about fitting them to my Iceman. Everything went well, and it didn't take too long either, tested them and they sounded alright, but didn't have too much time to muck about with settings, pedals etc. so, I thought I'll test them fully tomorrow.

Saturday arrives, and I get a chance to have a good play around with some of my toys. Get the pedals set up, the amp nicely warmed up, the guitar tuned and ready, strike the first power chord, and woah, nice! :D Sounding good so far, but then I change to the neck pickup and there's zip, zilch, nada. It worked on Friday when I installed the pickups! ARGH!  

So, I check the pickup wiring at the pot, and it's reading as it should, but at the jack there's nothing when I switch to the neck. Switch to the bridge, and I'm getting 14.75 at the pot, and 14.85 at the jack. Take the switch out and check that, nothing at the neck, 14.85 at the bridge. So, I take the switch wire off the pot and pull it out at the switch hole, but there's nothing to see. No nicks, nothing. Everything points at a short in that wire, but I can't see anything, and I don't know what the multimeter should be telling me (it's just some numbers...), don't know how to set the multimeter so that it will give me the right answer! :?

HELP!?  :?

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

Un-solder the neck and read across the red and black (make sure the green and white are soldered together), you should get around 7.6K.

It's strange that it worked friday and not now.

[Skybone]

Tried that one Steve, it's reading about 7.3k. I'm guessing that there's a short between the pickup and the switch somewhere, as the bridge is working fine, so the wire from the switch to the jack socket is fine.

I guess I'll just have to re-wire the neck to switch connection.  :(

[HJM]

Do you get any sound from the neck pup at all? Try tapping the neck pickup with a screwdriver when the selectors in the middle and see what happens.
Watch the braided wire if you have it - it'll short things out if it touches (have a look at the neck vol pot for this!)

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

Tried that one Steve, it's reading about 7.3k. I'm guessing that there's a short between the pickup and the switch somewhere, as the bridge is working fine, so the wire from the switch to the jack socket is fine.

I guess I'll just have to re-wire the neck to switch connection.  :(

ahh good, at least the pickups not broken!

[Skybone]

Right, here's an update on the situation.

The pickup is wired to the neck vol pot, black & braid to pot, red to 1st tag with cap, green & white taped up & out of the way. Tapping the poles with a screwdriver gets a sound, but it's quite faint, as is playing.

I took the multimeter to the switch, as there was a signal from the pickup, but nothing from that pickup to the jack. I figured out that it wasn't the output from the switch, as the bridge pickup was working, and putting the multimeter on the output jack gave a 15k ohm reading, but if I switch to the neck pickup, there's hardly a reading. Took a wild guess at the problem being the wire from the pickup to the switch, so I've rewired that, (pups out, wire out, thread wire through, pups in etc, etc) and remade all the joints to the pot in the process, tested it, getting readings of around 7k ohm. Tried the tapping the poles again, and I could hear the tapping, but when I play, there is only a really, really faint signal being sent to the amp.

That was the situation last night, and I've not tried it today as I've just been too busy with other stuff. I'm kind of flummoxed now, so I'm going to leave it for a bit (and wait for any bright ideas from you lot! ;) ), if not, it's down to EMS for them to sort! :(

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

The pot may be broken and only letting a bit of the signal through. How far away from the strings is the pickup?

[big steve]

use the multimeter across the pots to check they're all ok

[HJM]

I'd just swap the cables going to the switch over, just in case...if not see Mr  Palmer....

[Skybone]

There's a signal from the pot to the switch (checked both wires from, pot end to switch) and there is a signal, but there doesn't seem to be any signal coming from the switch to the jack socket, but the bridge pickup is working fine.

There is a really faint signal coming from the neck pickup that can (just) be heard, but it's nowhere near the output that it should be. The pickup is position at about 2-3mm below the strings, which is way higher than I usually have the neck pickups (which is about 5-6mm), and there's still very little signal.

I might go and have a chat to Pod at some point this week.  :(

[Tim]

Don't panic Mr Mannering!Give me a call tomorrow and I'll talk you through.

[Steve-Mr Pig 2U]

Pick up has arrived for a check over and every thing is in working order. There must be a fault between the pickup and the jack, I hope this narrows it down a bit for you, we will get it back to you asap!

[Skybone]

All's well that end's well. Or something like that anyhow. ;)

Got the pickup back the other day, and finally got around to fitting it yesterday, it was the old pot that was causing the problems. I should learn how to test them insitu as well.

Thanks to Tim & Steve for all the work they did on that pickup for me, great stuff guys! That guitar sounds great now, the Crawler's really suit it.