Tone, you're drunk, you're not a volume. (halp pls)

[SabrePanzer]

...Okay, so I wired up my "Sledgehammer" project, which is a Warmoth Birdseye Maple/Rosewood neck and Warmoth Alder Strat body, with two CTS 500k pots and one DiMarzio 250k pot stuffed in it. CTS 500k volume for the Bill Lawrence L500XL in the bridge, and the DiMarzio 250k as a volume for the SD Hot Rails neck single, with the remaining CTS 500k as the master tone.

First of all, I already know that I need to pull ol' Sledge back apart because the DiMarzio pot's been junk ever since I first wired it in Sledge's predecessor (it doesn't roll off all the way). However, I've found out that things are REALLY not what they seem beyond the volume controls.

The wiring setup goes neck and bridge pickup -> independent neck and bridge volume -> three way switch -> master tone -> output jack. I used a SD wiring diagram to wire up everything past the switch, with some derping about to wire up everything else in the line before the switch due to the oddball switch that I got being confusing as hell.

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised when I rolled the volume down to about halfway on the Bill Lawrence (selected bridge only because middle position only gives you the neck position because junk constantly-on pot), then rolled the tone down and the volume cut with the tone, almost all the way off! After some dabbling around with it (finding some interesting uses for it as well such as using the tone as a "choke" for the Hot Rails to get a cleaner sound out of it, albeit muffled due to the fact that the tone still functions as a tone control too.

Just wondering if somebody (anybody!) could help me out with this issue, I would GLADLY appreciate it. I'd prefer to use as little rewiring as possible because of the fact that it's a pretty damn tight squeeze with all of the wire bridges that I needed to make...  :-\

Though I kinda plan on pulling the Bill Lawrence out, too, considering the fact that it's too goddamn bright for me. With the tone all the way up, hitting the strings hard with sorta-low gain feels like someone's driving an icepick into my skull... I'm half-tempted to make another loaded pickguard using a rotary switch and concentric combo vol/tone pots. Or maybe even just use a mini-toggle killswitch and just use those concentric pots to just blend the pickups together... I wanna try and get this fixed first, though, because I don't have the money to do such a thing. :I

TL;DR: Tone control is also volume control when actual volume is turned down slightly. Went off of SD diagram above to wire up the tone control, unsure whether or not cap is wired in wrong place or something. Please help.

 

[mayfly]

I think we're going to need some photos of what you've done in there.

 

[line6man]

If you have a shunted capacitor, or one of the wrong value, then a tone control actually becomes a volume pot.

 

[SabrePanzer]

Well... I don't have actual pics considering the guitar's still together at the moment, but I did hotlink the SD wiring diagram that I used for the most part, then disregarded the switch instructions because this is the style of switch that I've got (not the exact model though), and the wiring diagram is for a standard Gibson-style switch. I had to figure out how to wire that thrice-damnable thing by myself. That picture I just linked would've made things SO much easier, yet I couldn't find it because apparently it's not a commonly-used switch. I also found out that the ground that I wired to the switch is on the backside of the switch even though those prongs or whatever are what holds the metal back plate on... I have that switch wired from the "bottom" lugs on either side to the middle lugs, and then the center out to the tone the way it's shown in the schematic. The cap is a DiMarzio .047 on the same type of CTS 500k pot that the Bridge Volume uses, so I'm not sure if I need a special control or not. Probably not (hopefully), but meh.

...Wait. I remember that one of the lugs on the tone pot, the far right one, when looking at it from above with the lugs towards you, was just a tiny bit loose... I tried to secure it in place on the flat with a tiny bit of solder... fuuuuuuuuuuck. I KNOW I didn't get any solder on the other lugs, but what if that's the reason why it's screwed up?

idk. I just... blargh. I'm about ready to do that one thing involving the blended concentric pots only. I'm not a wiring artisan, so I'm not really skilled with making über-clean and neat solder joints. I'm about as skilled as Eddie was when he first made ol' Franky, and the first incarnation of Sledgehammer (which has since been renamed "Project Nemesis" due to it being an Alvarez/Westone Villain) only had a single volume pot wired up in it. Which was the DiMarzio one that I junked because I had very little experience in soldering. So I seriously, honestly don't know. I do know that there's also an intermittent/constant grounding issue too SOMEWHERE...

...I swear I'm about to just go with stuff like the SD Liberator (or possibly engineer my own damn connections) so I don't have to constantly pull apart a guitar, drag out the soldering iron, and see if my poorly-done solder joints on the pots work right. :/

I know that I also had to use some other wire that I had laying around, though, due to the fact that the normally-used stuff that I had was used between the pots and switch. I had to use heavier 20AWG (I think that's the gauge, I don't know, it was in the garage and my grandfather had a LOT of wire spools laying around) aluminum or tinned copper wiring (I think it may be aluminum)...

At this point, I'm tempted to just rip all of the pots out and swap it for a two-volume setup going straight out to the jack. I would like to do more with less because at this point I'm getting frazzled from the jump from single volume to two volume one tone and some crazy-ass three-way switch that you can't even really find on the internet! At least I can't really find it anyways. I got lucky as hell finding that schematic, like I said... *sigh*

EDIT: I forgot to add something. This here is the other wiring diagram that brought me into question the cap placement. As you can see, it has the cap wired to the far right lug instead of the center like how SD has it. So I'm not sure if that cap placement has anything to do with the reason why the thing's messed up or not.