Oh, I'm not embarrassed. I was getting the hang of it near the end. It's fricken harder than I thought, though.

I really hated the drag on the pots, they're super loose. So, I ordered some different ones and will give this another try in a few days. I'll get to posting the pictures soon.

an easy fix for pots that feel too loose is just buying a box of random rubber o-rings at the hardware store and putting them around the shaft. You can dial in the feel of the turn by how hard you press down on the knob before you tighten the set screw.

c jury wrote: Mon Aug 25, 2025 1:35 am yep- the first couple are always tough. No way around it but to keep practicing.

if you post pics, we can maybe troubleshoot, or give pointers. I recognize it is probably something you'd rather not share, But no one here is gonna judge.

Here's my hack job. I think I can do a better soldering job next time around. It's really hard to get the hang of getting the solder to melt, and if you eff up, it's really hard to get it off and so you get that mess of clumps and burned flux and shitty cold connections, as you know. I'm using a proper solder for electronics, but it's the led-free kind that uses silver instead. I've got a Bakon soldering iron set at 350 C.

I used a green wire around the pots to create a ground bus. I wanted to use that braided shielded wire, but I couldn't get the solder to properly set on the braiding, oddly. It was more of a pain and it was much easier to work with the green wire. The hardest parts to solder was anything to a pot for ground. The lugs were easy to get in and out of and make actual good connections. The one lug that gave me the most trouble though was the switch ground.

For soldering, I would clean the iron tip, then melt some solder on it. I would then melt solder on the wire tip that I would be connecting. Then I would add more solder to the iron tip and put some of it on the pot to get started. Then I would heat the area and connect the wire to the pot. Sometimes the solder would melt, sometimes it wouldn't. The Bakon seems like a solid iron that shouldn't fluctuate too much in temp.

The red wiring connects the volume pot to the tone pot. The tone pots have the resistors connected as shown in the diagram I posted. I pretty much followed that diagram to a tee.

I took a photo of the wires coming out of cavity from the bridge to show that I have a green ground cable connected from the bridge to the ground bus.

Man, that wiring job looks better than any of mine and I've built like a dozen of these things. Soldering is the only part of the guitar building process I don't like, my excuse is I don't really have depth perception and I especially don't have it up close, so stuff like soldering I just find irritatingly difficult.

Anyway, for next time, scuff up the back of the pots with some sandpaper before you solder to them, it'll stick much better/quicker.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Thu Aug 28, 2025 9:44 am Man, that wiring job looks better than any of mine and I've built like a dozen of these things. Soldering is the only part of the guitar building process I don't like, my excuse is I don't really have depth perception and I especially don't have it up close, so stuff like soldering I just find irritatingly difficult.

Anyway, for next time, scuff up the back of the pots with some sandpaper before you solder to them, it'll stick much better/quicker.

I did some scuffing. I don't think I did it enough, though, looking at some soldering techniques online last night.

Lead-free solder is making your life unnecessarily harder, unless you can't buy solder with lead where you're at, my apologies if that's the case. I have a one lb. spool of Kester 63/37 that will last the rest of my life at my current rate of consumption.

Soldering grounds to the back of potentiometers is just difficult, though. I do it with a 100W iron and a big chisel tip, the idea being that the tip has enough thermal mass to heat the pot casing up quickly, so that you can flow the solder and remove the iron quicker.

W.L.Weller wrote: Thu Aug 28, 2025 4:29 pm Lead-free solder is making your life unnecessarily harder, unless you can't buy solder with lead where you're at, my apologies if that's the case. I have a one lb. spool of Kester 63/37 that will last the rest of my life at my current rate of consumption.

Soldering grounds to the back of potentiometers is just difficult, though. I do it with a 100W iron and a big chisel tip, the idea being that the tip has enough thermal mass to heat the pot casing up quickly, so that you can flow the solder and remove the iron quicker.

I went with led free for a reason. Anyway, I got some flux rosin to help.

Just another set back. I ordered some different pots from Stew Mac and a different jack, since I had a long-threaded one and needed a short one.

Of course, they send me all the wrong sizes than what I ordered. I had to double check that I didn't accidentally order the wrong lengths, because that can be really confusing. But they literally sent me all the wrong items...

Bah, anyway, can't finish this until they send me the replacements. I have never ordered from Stew Mac before, but I would have expected them not to fuck up a simple order like this.

FWIW pretty much anything you can get from stew mac you can get from philadelphia luthier, free shipping over 50 bucks

https://www.philadelphialuthiertools.com/