The Electra Forums

My soldering and electrical skills are improving, but they're both my weak point. I just wired a Strat pickguard from scratch. 2 boutique single coils with a 2 wire boutique humbucker pickup in the bridge. 3 x 250 K CTS pots, CRL 5-way, switchcraft jack, Orange drop .47 cap. I wired it to a standard strat diagram and used vintage style cloth.wax pull back wiring. It's very well grounded and there's a ground wire from the back of the volume pot to the trem claw. All solder joints are good and shiny. The problem, this guitar is noisy as hell in all positions even though it plays and sounds good. Take your hands of the strings it gets worse, put your hands on the bridge, it gets better. Any thoughts as to where the grounding issue could be?

Thanks for any input!

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"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." - Groucho Marx

couple of questions:

1. what kind of lighting are you playing in?

2. are the control cavities and covers shielded?

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My Electra Pages
I have too many projects!

Hey Mick, There's a fluorescent nearby, but that's not it. I move away and it's still 10 times worse than my other strat with almost identical guts. As for the shielding, standard strat shielding on the PG and shielding paint in the cavity. I'm 100% it's some kind of grounding issue as it's not bad if my hand is on the strings or bridge...but I sure can't find the problem. I'm kinda just wondering if it has something to do with the Humbucker going in to 250k pots as I've never done that before.

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"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." - Groucho Marx

Mick, and anyone else who's interested, sorta figured it out. Went over the whole setup again and noticed many diagrams have the jack ground on the back of the volume pot, I had it on the 2nd tone pot. Corrected that and cleaned up some extra solder on the backs of the pots, re-did a couple of other joints and it's much better. It still has the noise you'd expect from single coils, but now it's acceptable in pos 4 and on the bucker (the only pos I use on it).

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"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." - Groucho Marx

sounds like you're missing the ground wire to the bridge- or on a strat to the trem claw.

I know the pg shielding usually grounds all the pots together, but I usually add ground wires to tie all the pots together along with the jack....

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My Electra Pages
I have too many projects!

It's much better now, the ground wire from the volume pot to the claw was there all along and I always run a ground from pot to pot. I think this just falls under the category of Strats are noisy. It did clean up quite a bit when I cleaned up a couple of solder joints and moved the claw ground from a tone pot to the vol pot. Thanks!

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"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." - Groucho Marx

BTW -

I know this is an old post but I still wanted to add something...

If you are using a humbucker with the singles, the 250K volume pot (if used on the humbucker) will attenuate the high end off the pickup making the humbucker sound unusually dark. You may get better results with a 500K volume pot for the bridge pickup. If it is shared with all the pickups, the 500K will make your single coils a little brighter as well, but usually not objectionably so. But a 250K with a humbucker usually is objectionably attenuated and dull sounding.

I found out several times on one guitar that had the wrong value pots installed in it from the factory and they were NOT marked. So put in 3 sets of humbuckers in it before I checked the value of the pots with a meter to discover the were entirely wrong for the guitar (in this case, the guitar had 2 humbuckers). So all of my swapping pickups and money spent on it was for no really good reason except the factory pots were the wrong value. It was NOT an electra (it was a Peavey Odyssey).

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Thorny