Fezz Parka mod, not working!

[teletwang67]

I wired it exactly like this. I know the pickups work, I just changed it from a normal strat.


Edit: How do I make the picture smaller?

[banjohabit]

when i did mine i initially soldered the leads to the wrong side of the switch. oops

[teletwang67]

I tried both sides of the switch and it did the same thing. The bridge and middle pickups work sometimes, the neck is very quiet. The switch seems to be working right, and all the knobs do what I expected them to do. I know the pickups work. It's connected to the jack the way it should.

[E5RSY]

Are you using a no-load pot for the blender?

[teletwang67]

I'm using a normal 250K pot.

[fezz parka]

It'll work fine with a no-load pot. Somethings funky with your switch.

[teletwang67]

I'll try a different switch. Should I take off the treble bleed? I added one because I use the volume knob a lot, but I don't think this should cause any problems.

[fezz parka]

Treble bleed circuit is redundant if you're using this wiring scheme.

[teletwang67]

Ok, I'll take it off. I tried a different switch and it works, except the neck pickup. It is a low output pickup (5.5k), but I'm not hearing much at all. I checked the wiring again, it's right.

[fezz parka]

There may be an intermittent short on the neck p/u. Wire it directly to the output to check it. Pickups are very delicate things. It's really not hard to screw one up.

[E5RSY]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

It'll work fine with a no-load pot. Somethings funky with your switch.

Meaning, a no-load pot is required, right? Or, wrong?

[teletwang67]

I have a different neck pickup in it now, it works. But now the volume isn't working. It worked fine until I screwed it on the pickguard in and started putting strings on it

[braderrick]

Sounds like you may be shorting something when you are trying to make everything fit into the wiring cavity. I've done this before. Try and make everything as nice a tidy as possible before trying to fit it all in as you install the pickguard. You could have also pulled something loose whilt fitting the pickguard.

[fezz parka]

Originally Posted by E5RSY

Meaning, a no-load pot is required, right? Or, wrong]?

Typo. It'll work fine with a regular pot.

[AJBaker]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

Typo. It'll work fine with a regular pot.

The point of the no-load is to get the 'other' pickup completely out of the circuit. With a normal pot, when your using the bridge pickup you'll still have a tiny amount of neck pickup in the signal.
I modified the setup a bit to make it a bit more intuitive.
1) The way it's shown in the diagram, the blender pot at 10 is no blend, and turned all the way down, is full blend. It's shown like that so it can work with a normal no-load (that was designed for a tone control). So, I reversed the wires on the pot, so 10 is now full blend.
2) No-loads are audio taper, but a blender works better with a linear pot. With an audio pot, one pickup would blend in gradually, while the other came on all of a sudden. (I had a 300k linear sitting around)
3) Since I still wanted the 'other' pickup completely out of the circuit, I made a reverse no-load. I just put the nail varnish on the other side of the carbon trace.

Hope this helps!
I'm afraid I don't know what's not working in your setup. Maybe try disconnecting the blender from the switch, the test the switch connections with a multimeter.

[fezz parka]

Originally Posted by AJBaker

The point of the no-load is to get the 'other' pickup completely out of the circuit. With a normal pot, when your using the bridge pickup you'll still have a tiny amount of neck pickup in the signal.

Really, I didn't know that.

[teletwang67]

It works fine with a normal pot. I don't hear anything different.

[AJBaker]

Originally Posted by fezz parka

Really, I didn't know that.

Well, the mod has your name on it, I'm pretty sure you know more about than me...:-)

This is my favourite setup on my strat now, and I did some experimenting to get it right. I didn't try using a journal pot though, but having 250k in series with the pickup is probably going to block just about everything. Do you think it's about the same as a no load?

[fezz parka]

LOL. It shouldn't have my name on it.

I wire up my Strats a little different. Three way switch, wired like a tele(B/B+N/N) and blend in the middle if I have the urge to "quack"(Which I very rarely do!)

[braderrick]

Hmm never really thought of wiring a strat up brent mason style...