5 way switch

[H. Acevedo]

Greetings,

I just put my electronics together on my strat project. Traditional set up with 3 single coils, 1 vol., 2 tone. I,m not getting any sound from positions 1 and 2. Positions 3, 4, and 5 work perfect. Also, the first tone control is not working very good. The second tone control works perfect. The first tone control works somewhat but you can barely tell a diffrence in tone. The switch that I'm using is from Fender. I do have a replacement from Switchcraft. I've noticed that the wiring directions are different for each switch. I tried changing out the switch first but ended up with more problems. This time nothing would work except position 4 on the switch. I triple checked the wiring directions on both switches and matched wire for wire on each set of directions. Is there something I'm overlooking?

Thanks

[daveq]

Can you post what is wired to each terminal? I know yo followed and checked the wiring diagrams but maybe it will be obvious to some of us by seeing what the instructions told you to do. Sometimes, when drawing a schematic by tracing your wiring (instead of copying the instructions), you turn up something that you didn't see when going the other direction. I know it's happened to me a few times.

Do you have a meter that you can use for checking continuity (ohm meter)? This might be handy once we are further along. If you do have one, verify that the proper terminals get connected in each of the positions. For example, in position 1, write down which terminals are connected, ... for each position of the switch. Remember that some positions connect more than two terminals together - so test them all.

If we had this information, I think many of us could help more easily.

A shortcut (for the position 1 and 2 problem) might be to test that your bridge coil is connected to the volume pot when in position 1. You can test that with the ohm meter. Find the bridge coil wire and put one lead on that and the other lead on the volume pot (usually the right hand lug).

[H. Acevedo]

Thanks for the advice daveq. I would of posted the diagram but don't know how. I did find out what my problem was. The problem with the first switch was not the switch being bad but the neck pick up had a broken wire around the coil. I found that problem by using my meter and checking ohms. Luckily, I only had to unwind the pick up about 12 turns to find the broken wire. I then soldered the wire back in place. I still had a slight problem with the switch though. On position 2, sometimes if i wiggled the switch it wouldn't quit working. It would only do it in that position though.

The problem with the second switch was the way it was wired. Like I said before, the wiring directions were different from the first switch. So I tried to rewire the switch the same way the first switch was wired. It worked perfect after that.

Again thanks. Next time I'll try to do a little more work to find out what the problem is. If I would of used my meter I probebly would have found the problem.