Pacifica rewire problems

[Bear]

Hello all.

My brand new Yamaha Pacifica desperately needed a rewire and upgrade; the Alfa pots vol 500k and tone 250k crackled, and wobbled, the wiring looked like spaghetti, bear wires and an earth wire un-soldered floating around. I was not impressed with Yamaha or the shop who sold it to me.

 

Time for an upgrade to install CTS pots, vol 535k, tone 515k, 22uf orange drop capacitor, and mod it with a phase reverse to the middle pickup.

 

Now the job is done the phase reverse of middle pickup and coil tap of the humbucker works well, however It has problems with low volume from the neck and middle pickups; half that of the humbucker. 

Also the tone doesn't seem to work until it gets between 3 and 0.

 

Any help you can give will be appreciated.

 

Here's the wiring diagram:

 

YAMAHA-PACIFICA-612.bmp

[FrankAtari]

 

Buy a new guitar?

[ezbass]

I would have been inclined to return the guitar, Yamahas are normally solid as a rock, whatever price point they are and loose electronics sounds like someone has been messing around with it. Was it new?. Assuming that there are no shorts in the circuit, neck and middle will always be lower output than the humbucker and perhaps the slightly higher rated pots may be contributing to that. As to the tone issue, perhaps the taper is incorrect. As you can tell, I'm no expert and this is the best I can come up with.

[FrankAtari]

15 hours ago, ezbass said:

I would have been inclined to return the guitar, Yamahas are normally solid as a rock, whatever price point they are and loose electronics sounds like someone has been messing around with it. Was it new?

 

I agree, give it back and get a new one. You don't want to mess up with wires and pots etc because you're forced to. At the end of the day did you buy the guitar to learn music or electronic?

 

 

 

[Bear]

Looking for the most tech reasons for the volume problem, I completely lost track of the low tech and obvious; I raised the single pickups and lowered the humbucker.

The humbucker is still a little bit more powerful than the singles, but I can live with that. 

Ok that's the volume sorted, and I'm sure the problem with the tone pot is down to who I bought it from. An arrogant seller that agreed to sort through his CTS audio taper pots to find two that are higher than 500k (these pots are sold as 500 but can be as low as 420k), well one was 514 the other was no where near, I'm guessing the 514 that I used for the tone wasn't audio taper either.

I deliberately went out to find higher than usual 500k pots as I wanted this Yamaha to be bright.

 

After finding out CTS sell their pots as 500k but could actually be anything, I took my multi meter to my two les pauls, yup they're only 420k all eight of them.

 

Ok, back to my brand new Yamaha top of the Pacifica range 612VIIFMX . The shop said it would be all set up from Yamaha when I get it, erm no it wasn't not even close to being anywhere near set up.

Seeing the wire adrift and crackly Alfa pots, and kinked G string they agreed to fix the problems and set it up properly as agreed before I purchased it. So it went back to them, and back to me, and all the luthier had done was to change the string and solder the wire up. While he was there he butchered most of the screw holes in the wood for me.

I complained, and they said sent it back and we will have another go.

At this point I thought about a brand new Ferrari in the hands of a moron, who's job it was to wash the car; so out comes the bucket of soapy water and a Brillo pad. Do you ask him to do it again?

Not a chance! After re-wiring, pot change, phase mod, and proper setting up, it sounds an feels so much more than it did stock, even with a doggy tone pot.

    Thanks for your input