[junebughunter]

I am putting a PAF Pro and Fred into my jem. I am going to finish it all tonight but I had one problem with the wiring. When I took it apart there was what appeared to be a ground screwed to the body inside the cavity, just in the raw wood. I thought that was strange and I can't seem to find it in any wiring diagrams. I didn't take note of where the other end went to when I took it apart.

It's basically a 3-4 inch long wrapped wire with an open end on one side and a "O" shaped piece of metal on the other end where it screwed to the body.

 

[bluealien]

The main ground wire for the guitar, which I have seen it screwed into the body with a washer tab or is soldered to the spring based of the trem. The other end will just solder to the back of the volume pot as a ground.

Hopefully you can see it here, connected to the back of the volume pot (Mine solder to the spring base)

 

[Dee]

Yeah, solder it to the vol pot and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Beaten to it!

 

[junebughunter]

I got everything soldered up tonight. It was a PIA!!! The problem I ran into was that my guitar was not previously wired as it is shown on either jemsite, ibanez's site, Dimarzio's site or any site I could find. I don't know how it used to be, so that confused me a bit.

Anyway once I finally sat down and really thought about it, it was quite simple, I could probably do it again in third of the time.

I am going to go through it again tomorrow and re-do a few things, mainly just to clean it up and have less of a wiring mess. I also want to add better shielding to my guitar and new shielding to the back of the new pickguard, how neccisary do you think the shielding is though.

The only problem I have now, which I will fix tomorrow is that there is a little hum coming from the guitar. I am guessing it is because the trem system is not actually in the guitar, the ground is just soldered to the spring claw which is dangling in the back. I'll install the trem tomorrow first and see what that does. Right now if I touch either a pot or the trem claw the hum goes away. So that sounds like a ground problem to me.

How neccesary is the shielding?

 

[bluealien]

Well the back of the pick guard is usually shielded, other then that your humbucker pickups have shielded wire. Now based on how you solder it, you may have a cold solder joint which its not grounding correctly, when you install all your hard ware this will help to create more of a real ground, because all hardware becomes the ground now. I would also look at the wires, if they coating is dry & brittle, then the wires will probably be bad, and you will need to buy now wire. I had to do that on a real old guitar before.

Well hope this helps... good job!

 

[junebughunter]

Ok sounds good, I am going to replace a few wires, quick question all of my wires I have now are just coated copper wires, should I use steel wire or will the copper work?

 

[bluealien]

I think all my pick wires were standard wire (steel), now I do know copper wire is better because it can usually carry more current and large amounts of copper can keep the resistance down. It is also good to have a lot of turns to make better use of the available current.

This is why copper is used around the coil.

I will recheck tonight what the standard is, but you should replace it with what was originally wired in the guitar.