Messed up my CV Strat pickup swap - help

[Spudman***]

Do you have an ohm meter? I would get a measurement from each pickup to make sure they are putting out correctly.

When you got them did you take off the covers and look at the windings? Sometimes taking covers on and off you can accidently catch one of the fragile windings and break it without even noticing. That would change the pickup's output.

[Duffy]

Do you have the pickguard off? If so are the wires still soldered from the pickguard to the tremolo claw and to the output jack? You have to have it grounded to the trem claw and the hot has to go to the output jack for this to work right.

Also, do you use soldering flux? This greatly helps. You brush some paste flux on the intended solder point after roughing up the site slightly, then place the wires at the site to be soldered to. You want the wires at the bottom of the solder pile. The solder pile should be kept to a minimum. brush on some paste flux as you got to speed up the soldering process. You should heat up the soldering site and wires adequately so that when you touch the solder wire to the wires, the wires draw the solder into the strands; rather than pileing the solder on top of cool wires. The soldering flux will greatly help to get a good solder joint. I always use solder that contains LEAD, and I use thin solder wire, about one half a mm in diameter, maybe a little thicker. I get it at Radio Shack, one of the only places carrying leaded solder.

At the switch you want your solder sites to be independent of other solder sites, with none of the solder joints touching, even slightly, other solder joints; except at the central solder joint where all the grounds are soldered together in one solder joint.

Finished solder joints should be shiny and not be huge piles of solder heaped on top of other piles. Use only enough solder to get a good joint and start with a good and hot solder site before applying solder to the wires and site. Don't heat the solder wire and expect it to drop onto the wires and solder site and hold the wire there. Heat the site first and draw in the solder when you apply the solder to the site, not to the soldering iron tip. Watch that your soldering iron doesn't melt the insulation off surrounding wires, get them out of the way even if you have to tie them off. Don't use a soldering gun, use a soldering pencil or a soldering iron. I have a twenty five watt one and a bigger fourty watt one for quickly heating up soldering sites, then I use the small one to get in there with precision.

Try to use these principles even when you solder in the old pickups.

When you put on the Neovins did you ever put the pickguard on the guitar and tune up the strings and listen to how it sounded in place? All the wires have to be connected and you won't know how it will sound if you don't pluck a string over the pickup.

Hope this gives you some ideas. I've had to resolder pickups myself to get the joints right and the connections right. Sometimes it can be difficult, especially when the replacement pickups are not wired like the old ones.

I personally would try not soldering to the switch box and the note in the instructions about soldering the silver shielding to a separate ground from the black ones would encourage me to solder them to a different pot or something other than the common ground where all the black wires are grounded.

Also I would not hesitate to email GFS for further assistance, even though it might be weak assistance, if any. Seymour Duncan, no affln., has a technical support guy you can call on the phone, just as an example of superior customer service provided by a premium pickup maker.

I would agree that you need to work on your soldering skills so that you can get good solder joints. Using paste soldering flux will GREATLY simplify getting a good solder joint for a beginner or even an old timer having difficulty. If the solder wants to roll off of the solder site, you need soldering flux brushed on there to burn off the impurities and make the solder joint a place where the solder can adhere without needing to roll off.

[progrmr]

Hey Duffy -

Yes, the volume pot has a wire that is soldered to the claw and the input jack is wired up. I put all 3 pickups in, re-strung the guitar and gave it a shot. Found it was messed up, pull off the bottom 3 strings and loosened the top 3.

Each time I'd make a change, drop the pickguard back in, tighten up the 3 strings, and test. Sounds like fun huh?? lol - got to be a real PITA.

The 3 ground wires from the original pickups where soldered in one big pile on the switch. When I had removed the pickups and started doing one at a time I did keep the grounds separate but the problem persisted.

I think there is just something about these neovins - I messed up my 5-way (discovered those are a total piece of crap inside though ) so I have an american strat 5-way enroute. Then I'm going to take the whole pile to my luthier and have them make it work lol!

I did replace the volume pots on my Electra LP (after this mess) and it works fine so I think my soldering technique is at least adequate. I should've just stuck with some plain-jane strat pickups instead of this noise canceling thing. I'd be rocking my CV right now!

[Heywood Jablomie]

Hmmmmm.... maybe there's a reason they're called "noiseless"

[progrmr]

Hmmmmm.... maybe there's a reason they're called "noiseless"

LOL!!

[Duffy]

I have thought about getting Neovins. The more I thought about it, I thought about how I have had much better luck with Seymour Duncans, etc., rather than the bargain brands. One thing about GFS is that their instructions are very weak, at least in some of the cases I've encountered.

I also need real good instructions because I'm an amateur at installing pickups and there are a lot of different types of wiring and at least two types of switches, ones with solder tabs all on one side and others with staggered tabs from side to side. I suppose the staggered ones are lined up just like the ones that are all on the same side, but don't know for sure.

I have also noticed that the switches on the CV strats are really cheap and prone to malfunctioning very easily. I have to get a new good one and put it in, or have it put in, one of my CV 50s. If I push it just in the right place it works. On the other hand I have a Squier standard strat switch that is built like a tank.

I usually try to save money by doing guitar electronics myself. Sometimes I really mess it up and have to bring it to a tech after all. Other times I have done as much work as I can, installed the pickups to the guard, taped the wires together to fit in the wire rout, left the pickguard unscrewed but on the guitar with the screws in a little baggie. Then I've taken it to a tech and all he has to do is solder the wires to the right places. Sometimes I get pots or switch upgraded at the same time, and save the money involved in labor time it would take to do the easy things I can do. And I do it so it's easy for the tech to finish the job.

Using that unleaded solder that requires a lot more heat to melt, you could have burned out some stuff in the switch. Plus you were adding heat when you were soldering the grounds onto the switch case. One way to absorb heat when soldering is to wrap as much of the switch or whatever part with a wet/damp washcloth or other fabric, so that the wet fabric acts as a heat sink to draw off the excess heat by evaporation or conduction or whatever, thereby keeping the component cool and protecting nearby wood, capacitors, etc., cool.

[duhvoodooman***]

I'm going to be brutally frank about this, because I see it all the time over at the BYOC forums. I think it's just human nature, so please don't take these comments personally.

People decide to try doing DIY projects when they don't have any (or at least very much) experience....which is fine, because that's how experience is gained. Not surprisingly, these initial efforts quite often go awry. In my experience, at least 9 times out of 10 (and probably an even higher percentage than that), the problems are due to mistakes in technique or judgment borne of inexperience. And yet, more often than not, the first thing that gets blamed is....the manufacturer's crummy product!!

If the GFS Neovin pickups have been checked for resistance and come up OK, there's virtually ZERO chance that there's anything wrong with them. Not a lot of moving parts in a pickup! You may decide that you don't like their tone compared to standard single coils, but they should definitely work well enough, if properly installed. Incidentally, I have read that the performance of those neodymium-based pickups is extremely sensitive to their height adjustment under the strings. I hear they need to be within 1/8" of the strings or closer to work their best. This is true of several "noiseless" Strat/Tele pickup designs.

Re: the Squier 5-way switch, as it happens, I was just "under the hood" of a friend's '50s CV Strat two nights ago--was doing a little set-up work on the guitar he had just bought used. While I was putting on a fresh set of 9's, I decided to pop off the pickguard and take a look at the hardware and wiring. I was AMAZED at how good it looked in there. Nice workmanship, very neatly laid out--it looked better than any other Strat I've worked on, including a couple of MIA's, my '89 Strat Plus included. The 5-way looked like a very tidy design. I can't really comment on how durable it was, but it certainly didn't look like cheap crap to me. I can tell you that putting a lot of heat into the metal casing on a repeated basis isn't going to do a lot of good for what's inside. The switch could easily have been damaged by all that solder heat for the ground wiring.

I would definitely endorse your plan to take the guitar and the new switch to your favorite tech and have him do the work. Then make a point of asking him what was wrong & what he did to fix it. Good learning opportunity.

[progrmr]

haha, yea there is no experience like on the job training! lol

I'm sure the pickups are fine - after I took everything off and measure the wires the resistance of all pickups was correct.

The inside of that switch is a plastic center piece with little gears - on the side of the casing is a little BB that sits in a spot that interacts with the gears to create the detent effect. Functional, but not what I figured would be in there.

I couldn't wait for my 5-way to come. The luthier has 5-way switches so I just dropped the guitar off. As I was describing what I had already done and showing the guy the wiring diagram, I noticed that the steel braids were grounded to the switch and the black grounds where on the volume pot! I had the braided to the volume pot and the black on the switch so basically backwards! I was like "Aw s**t"!! Probably what the problem was.

Oh well - I'll have it back next week and it'll be rockin'.

[Heywood Jablomie]

I had the braided to the volume pot and the black on the switch so basically backwards! I was like "Aw s**t"!! Probably what the problem was.

Probably not - ground is ground, regardless of location, just like in an automobile electrical system, where the negative battery terminal is connected to the chassis making the entire car ground. In a guitar, as long as all grounds are connected directly or indirectly to the outer jack, they're all ground.

[duhvoodooman***]

Probably not - ground is ground, regardless of location....

'Xactly! That should make no difference....

[progrmr]

UPDATE:

I just got the guitar back from the luthier - the problem was that the pickups were mislabeled. The middle pickup had to be a specific pickup to make the whole noise canceling thing work. And the one that was labeled to be in the center was the incorrect pickup.

They ascertained which one was the correct pickup, wired it in the middle position and everything just worked. Sucked that I had to pay them to do it, but I'd have never figured this out on my own.

I'll be rockin' that baby after work tonight, but it sounded great in the shop when I picked it up.

[Commodore 64***]

Send Jay the bill.

[Duffy]

I agree with Commodore. You might want to take a close up picture of the bill with your digital camera and upload it to your computer, attach it to an email to Jay and send him a note stating what the place had to do and why. You might want to give him their phone number as well. Possibly explain that you didn't contact him because you thought it was an improper installation problem and only the pro's found out that it was a pickup mislabeling problem.

You might get a credit for the full amount. How were you to suspect that sending them back for a new set would fix the problem?

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

[duhvoodooman***]

+1. When you incur extra cost because of their error, they should make it right. Though it's doubtful that they would cover your cost beyond what you paid for the pickup set. Jay should also know because my guess is that you are NOT the only customer who has received this mixup. Such errors are more often systematic than random. He could have dozens or even hundreds of mislabeled sets.

I'm also personally embarrassed that I didn't think of this possibility, because I had the same basic issue happen with one of the GFS Xaviere Strat copies--it came with the bridge and middle pickups swapped, so it wasn't hum-cancelling in the neck-middle switch position. But these were regular single coils, so I didn't run into the more severe problem that you encountered with the Neovins. So my apologies for not being more astute in recognizing and suggesting that possibility....

[Commodore 64***]

DVM, go sit in the corner for 5 minutes and reflect on your transgression.

[marnold***]

From what you described, I wouldn't have guessed the pickup switch either. That definitely was _a_ problem, but there was certainly another one (or more). Switching the pickups wouldn't make one dead, for example.

[progrmr]

yea, I'm not going to hit Guitar Fetish up for the bill - granted it was caused by them but really I expect to have pickups professionally installed anyway.

I got two great sets of pickups from them (GFS Mean 90's and these) but for my next pickups I'm going with the hand wound from my luthier - gonna put those in my Delta King even though they will cost more than the guitar did! I just really like the feel of it so it's worth investing in.

[otaypanky***]

They might appreciate being contacted about the mislabeling. You don't necessarily have to ask for compensation, they may offer. They may just be grateful to know about it and it would let them check on current stock before sending it out, thereby avoiding other customers going through the same thing ~

[progrmr]

That's a great point - I just emailed them so hopefully the will take some action to prevent creating other frustrated fretters