Tone Pot Woes

UnclePsychosis

New bass (Epiphone Embassy --- its awesome). 

Wired as Volume, Balance, Tone as stock. 

The tone pot is either absolute pony or is broken. Bass sounds as expected with the tone up "full", turning down the tone pot seems to do barely anything until right at the bottom of the travel. If I roll it up and down quickly there's a bit of a wah effect but overall its the most subtle tone pot I've ever heard. 

I opened it up and couldn't see anything obviously wrong. Measured between lugs 1 and 3 on the tone pot and got 500K. The back of the pot is grounded (via the back of the volume pot). 

I *think* this is just cheap electronics being cheap electronics, but is there a way to check definitively without desoldering anything? 

normula1

Turn the pot to the dentre and measure between the outside lugs and the centre. If they're around 250k, you've a linear pot which don't really work for tone controls

ICBM

normula1 said:

Turn the pot to the dentre and measure between the outside lugs and the centre. If they're around 250k, you've a linear pot which don't really work for tone controls

This - or if you're feeling more fiddly, turn the tone pot up from zero in increments of where the numbered positions would be, and measure the resistance between the two used terminals at each position.

Also, what value is the tone cap? There seems to be a fashion for using ineffectively small ones these days, although I think it's worse in guitars...

UnclePsychosis

ICBM said:

normula1 said:

Turn the pot to the dentre and measure between the outside lugs and the centre. If they're around 250k, you've a linear pot which don't really work for tone controls

This - or if you're feeling more fiddly, turn the tone pot up from zero in increments of where the numbered positions would be, and measure the resistance between the two used terminals at each position.

Also, what value is the tone cap? There seems to be a fashion for using ineffectively small ones these days, although I think it's worse in guitars...

Pretty sure its 0.047mfd