Epi LP wiring

NewTimer

Hey everyone. So a friend brought me his Epiphone LP. It was from the 90’s and had a lot of wear, had me clean it up for him, and asked me to install new CTS pots and a switch craft toggle to replace his worn import ones.

I carefully widened the holes by hand, took a ton of pictures as I went for reference, and started by replacing pot by pot, then the switch last. I found a wiring schematic that mostly matches.

It has a type of multi clip connector that joins a single cable from the switch to the control cavity, breaking out from there to the pots. Poor explanation, I apologize.

Felt pretty confident, however I botched something. The neck pickup is silent, and the neck pickup volume knob when both pickups are selected makes the total output go from silent, to loud, back to silent, as you go from 0-10.

I believe the volume knob oddity is simply a result of the neck pickup, not it’s own issue but can’t be sure until I get the neck pickup working.

when I get off of work I’ll take pictures if helpful, I assume I should start by looking at the volume pot for the neck for mistakes.

if anyone has any ideas on a good place to start troubleshooting otherwise I’d appreciate it, thanks.

Edit: another possibility I’ve thought of is that I have accidentally grounded the signal wire with its shielding where it’s all cramped up on the vol pot.

Flip

I'm not clear what you mean by a multi-clip connector. However, I wonder if my recent experience helps at all. I swapped out the Epi pickups on my grandson's 2020 Epi ES339. That has push-pull pots to slipt coils and uses what I guess you could call a multi-clip connector - the body depth doesn't allow for an old-fashioned push-pull.

I followed the colours on the original with the wire colours on the Warman pups I was installing. What I found was that the push-pull appears to operate in the opposite way to the original layout ie pushed in humbucker, pulled-out split coil.

Obviously, it's not a major problem, my grandson simply uses it as it is. Hope that might have helped and didn't just muddy the water.

NewTimer

Hmm that’s interesting! No, it’s something like this, I knew it was a poor explanation!

Funkfingers

NewTimer said:

the neck pickup volume knob when both pickups are selected makes the total output go from silent, to loud, back to silent, as you go from 0-10.

Some of this is normal for a conventional "modern" LP wiring harness. When both pickups are selected, turning down either volume control silences both pickups.

What happens if you select both pickups and operate the bridge pickup volume control between 0 and 10?

With both pickups selected, does tapping on the neck pickup produce any sound?

 

ICBM

NewTimer said:

The neck pickup is silent, and the neck pickup volume knob when both pickups are selected makes the total output go from silent, to loud, back to silent, as you go from 0-10.

You have a short in the neck pickup wiring. If it's the original plastic shielded cable, most likely you've overheated it and it's melted the core through to the shield at the volume pot. Simply shortening the cable by about half an inch will probably fix it. (As long as you don't short it again!)

I'll give you one guess how I learned that .