What would cause this?

[Skarekrough]

So I'm about 8 months into a restoration project of a 73' Strat.

About 6 months ago I sent the bridge pickup out to be rewound by Jason Lollar who did such an amazing job of rewinding it that I contemplated sending out the other two pickups to be rewound to the same specs even though they didn't need them; it was THAT good!

So a few months ago the guitar came back from getting a refret, bone nut to replace the brass nut and a 5 way switch to replace the stock 3 way.

Immediately when I got it home and plugged in I knew something wasn't right with the Lollar-rewound bridge pickup. It had maybe 1/3 the output and was shrill sounding. The tech's a pretty competent guy but obviously something isn't right for the pickup to go from sounding heavenly to unusable.

The tech has offered to take a look at it gratis, which I would expect them to do. But their backlog to even look at a guitar is a month. I'm decently handy with a soldering iron but would like any "usual suspects" sort of things to be looking for.

Any ideas?

Thanks....

 

[jeremy]

Re: What would cause this?

weird, check a wiring diagram and see how close yours looks to the pic

 

[sanrafael]

Re: What would cause this?

Check the resistance of the pup. One possible explanation is that the winding is broken inside the coil somewhere. The capacitive coupling between the windings causes the pup to have some output anyway, but it is low in level and all high frequencies. If the pup has normal resistance this is not the problem. No need to take the guitar apart at first. Switch to bridge pup, turn the volume all the way up, and measure the resistance across the end of the cable. If it is something like 6K, this is not the problem; if it is 250K, you are seeing the volume control only, and this might be the problem.