Going Potty

watting

Hey,

I have an Ibanez AS-73 my wife bought me for my 30th birthday (a few years ago now). Soon after getting it I swapped out the pretty poor stock pups for some Seymour Duncan's (a JB and a jazz). At the same time I replaced the electrics and pots so I could do the Jimmy Page mod (coils taps on the volume controls, and phase and series/parallel on the tone controls).

I paid a tech to do the work and, when I got the guitar back it all worked well and sounded great. However, after a while I found that taking a big semi acoustic to rehearsal wasn't practical, so stopped playing it for a while. Now I've come back to it I've found that the volume pots don't work correctly. There is no noticeable volume drop from 10 to around 1, and then it cuts out apart from a bit of hum. If I pull the pots in and out a few times I can sometimes get it working properly, but not always.

I've taken the pots out and had a look, and all the soldering looks good to me (certainly better than I could do). I even tried spraying some WD-40 into the pots (because that fixes everything, right?), but no luck.

Is there anything I can do, or do I need new pots? If so, does this always happen to push/pull pots, and am I better using regular pots?

Many thanks in advance,

Matt aka Watting.

SteveRobinson

Sounds like a short between the two non-earthed lugs of the volume pots. Check they are not touching and that there isn't any stray stands of wire.

Sarge

WD40 is no good for your pots, you need a contact cleaner, Servisol Super10 is super...

ICBM

Sarge said:

WD40 is no good for your pots, you need a contact cleaner, Servisol Super10 is super…

WD40 can be good for pots, although I wouldn't use it unless contact cleaner has already been tried and failed. WD40 very often does work well in this case though. If it doesn't, you're going to have to change the pot anyway, so it's always worth trying first.