Help with wiring issues

[FarToMany]

Hi all,

 

I am trying to fix a guitar for someone. Its an old Kramer Areostar dual humbucking pickup guitar (lowend 80's stuff). Its the guys first guitar so he wants to keep it but get it back in shape after a nephew of his "fixed it" buy destroying the wiring, loosing all the covers and loosing one bridge saddle.

 

Anyhow, I put all the wiring back to the diagram I used here

 

 

After completing this (the only difference is it has a toggle switch selector vs the 3 way tele as shown in the diagram), I plugged it in to find some horrible humming/buzzing from the amp. I checked my grounds, and all is good. I tried to eliminate the switch by wiring one pickup directly to the volume pot. Its better but still hums/buzzes pretty good.

 

All the wire I used itself is new, the 500k pots I found in my parts box but the "seem" ok. Could it be that the pickups themselves have become bad? It just seems odd that no matter what I do, i can not get it to stop humming. Please help. I am trying to get it figured out for him without spending a fortune on it, and me losing my shirt one what is supposed to be a quick little side job.

[FarToMany]

Anyone have an idea? I resoldered all my grounds again to make sure---i think next i am going to wire the pickups right to the jack to see if this is the issue. Whatcha think?

[Fred Buzz]

Do the humbuckers have 2 or 4 wires? The diagram you used is for single coil pickups, you need this:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=2h_1v_1t_3w

[mike42]

Sounds like you know what you're doing, but if the hum is really extreme I'd have to wonder about a hot/ground lead reversal somewhere. But if you can't find the prob, yeah, I'd try coming straight off the pickups to the amp to at least rule in/out the pickups as the source of the noise.

[Belva]

Bridge ground?

[Philfixit]

 

Bridge ground?

 

 

Many guitars (in the past, at least) had grounded bridges. Have a Garnet with one. And don't Strats have grounded trem claws?

[Prages]

Many guitars (in the past, at least) had grounded bridges. Have a Garnet with one. And don't Strats have grounded trem claws?

 

 

Unless a guitar has active pickups, they all should have grounded bridges.

[FarToMany]

Bridge is grounded and i resoldered all joints just to make sure no cold joints were present.

Pickups are just two conductor cheap humbuckers.

Someone above mentioned a hot/ground reversal, I thought about this too and am going to recheck all my wires again just to be sure.

Any other suggestions?

[FarToMany]

Thanks for all the help, it was indeed a power/ground reversal on the jack. Even though I looked at it several times yesterday, I guess today with a fresh look showed me I was wrong. Thanks for the help.

[_pete_]

 

Thanks for all the help, it was indeed a power/ground reversal on the jack. Even though I looked at it several times yesterday, I guess today with a fresh look showed me I was wrong. Thanks for the help.

 

 

As soon as I read your opening post I knew that was the problem.

This same thing has happened to a number of guys on this forum. Don't feel bad, it's a really common mistake.