Guitar Mod Project: Thu Jan 15th
New Bourns long-shaft pot arrived. Desoldered the old one (and tried to clean up my older solder blob mess with solder wick - messy).
Installed the new one, used the correct locking washer / inner nut to set the length and to prevent it from rotating.
Diagram from Next Gen Guitars
Re-attached the wires using just little dabs of solder - the common grounds going to the back of the pot, and fixed my earlier backwards wiring error.
In this view (bottom side up, as you would see inside the guitar), the input goes to lug 3, the output to the middle lug 2, and the ground lug to the ground on the output jack (with a jumper to the metal pot body, where the other grounds are wired off the internal shield ground lug). I had lugs 1 and 3 reversed!
Tested everything for continuity with a multimeter - all the hots go to the hot, all the grounds go to the ground, the copper shielding is conductive!
Now the next step is likely me taking it to my local guitar tech, as the new GraphTech ResoMax bridge isn't quite a fit for the existing studs, so he can swap for the ones that came with it, plus finish the setup and neck adjustments.
This was an interesting adventure, and I'm pretty pleased that I learned to solder relatively neatly and cleanly after my first tries, AND I didn't set anything on fire NOR did I burn myself (knock on wood).
I did end up using my Coway air purifier (the one that looks like a big iPod Shuffle) with its ionizer function to grab more rosin smoke than the little fume extractor could. Airflow matters!
If there is one thing I found mildly concerning, it's that while lead solder is very easy to work with compared to lead-free, once you start reworking / desoldering and using a solder sucker, you end up with tiny drops, balls, smears, flakes, trimmed wire ends and more all over your work area - not good. So keep a dustbuster vacuum nearby to zap up all those bits, dispose of them safely, and then wash it out to prevent solder blobs from becoming lead dust.
When I post again, I'll show the final product and record some samples!
















