MIJ 62RI Jaguar Rewiring

gavsguitargarage

Hi all,

I have a Crafted in Japan 62RI Jag in Olympic White.I was experiencing crackly electrics and a fairly poor overall sound.Decision was made to completely upgrade the electrics with a complete wiring kit sourced from Acme Guitar Works in the US.Thought it would be a good opportunity to upgrade the pups too so I purchased a set of Seymour Duncan SJAG-2's.All was put together exactly as the original wiring layout as there is no brass earth plate etc as on the US Jags.I used vintage style waxed wire throughout.All went swimmingly until I plugged her in,sounds worse than the original,would appear to have bad earthing problems.I earthed all (5) earth wires to the bridge volume pot as on the original.To help after the initial trial I added another earth wire from the earth connection on the jack to the bridge tone pot then onto the volume pot,helped a bit.I did solder the small wire on the new pots to the metal cage as on the originals.Shall strip down again to check all wiring but I'm pretty sure nothing is in the wrong place.Any advice would be much appreciated,thanks.

Earth

Show me the exact wiring diagram you used.

gavsguitargarage

Hi,thanks for your response.I could not find a diagram of the MIJ layout so used the Fender USA wiring diagram from the Fender website and kept a careful record of the original wiring.As the MIJ has no earth plate in the cavity I basically followed the US wiring as far as the coloured wires were concerned (which matched the original MIJ).The only difference was the 5 earth wires,2 x pickups,1 x upper control plate,1 x lower switch plate & the tremolo plate earth.These I soldered to the large 1 meg bridge pickup pot as per the original MIJ.The original wiring only had the green going to the hot connection on the jacksocket,as detailed in my initial post I added an earth to the earth connection on the jack,leading that to the large 1 meg bridge pickup tone pot then on to the bridge pickup volume pot along with the other 5 earth wires.I have not had it apart again but shall do so shortly to double check all connections are correct.Look forward to hearing your views.

Cheers,

Gav

Earth

Grounding the jack and tone pot to the volume pot with wire in unnecessary. You only have to ground the volume pot and tremolo (and all the other circuit stuff obviously) and then the tone pot and jack are grounded to the volume pot via the metal control plate.

If you followed the diagram, and the diagram from fender is correct, which it is, then you have made a boo boo somewhere. You're just gonna have to go over every single connection very carefully until you find the mistake. That's all you can do.

De-bugging is a pain in the a$$ when you're new to guitar wiring but its necessary and is also a valuable learning process.

gavsguitargarage

Hi,thanks for that,more or less what I thought I had to do anyroads.Just thought there may have been something glaringly wrong that I've done.Not new to guitar wiring,have built countless Strats & Tele's,check out my myspace page,this is my first encounter with the Jaguar though !!!! Let's get her opened up again,could well be,although I'm sure I did'nt,that one of the wires are crossed as I've used all white wires in place of the original coloured and black for the earths.The vintage style waxed wiring takes a bit more room up in the cavities too. Thanks again - Gav