gringopig's guitars
1962 Fender Jaguar
1962 Fender Jaguar in factory original sunburst. Purchased from Joni at jtkmstudio.com
Full time vintage Fender and Gretsch fanatic, he has more Jaguars than he knows what to do with.
I visited him in York to pick this beauty up and had a chance to play his other vintage goodies too!
Click on gallery for larger version
My first vintage Jaguar. It is an early one, still with the slab fingerboard in Brazilian rosewood. Flat on the bottom and reaching beyond the truss rod adjuster as it should.
Note the flat pole piece pickups which made it through to 1963 and then were changed to be a staggered height arrangement.
It's not mint but in very good condition.
I had it re-fretted and a new nut installed as the frets were dead and a Staytrem bridge installed but left the arm and collet as it is just perfect as it is.
The grounding on these early ones is a bit odd in that the tremolo cavity doesn't have its own rout for a grounding wire but instead receives a connection by means of a thin wire from control cavity plate to bridge thimble, through the actual bridge and then out down another thin wire onto the shielding plate under the pick guard.
Not ideal.
They changed it to be a ground wire from control cavity routed through the wood and into the tremolo cavity.
This originally came from Gary Dick at Gary's Classic Guitars in Ohio.
Interestingly, the guitar always had a cutting 'chirpy' bridge pickup and I measured the DC resistances of the pickups but it always read 1 M ohm, which I thought odd but I have gone back and thought about this. Let me show you a few circuit diagrams, forgive me...
Now, the first diagram is a representation of how the wiring is laid out and the second is a more traditional circuit diagram.
Looking at the second, if you follow the path from the OUTPUT to the LEAD CIRCUIT, you will see the MASTER VOLUME pot which when full up is connected to the top i.e. no resistance. If the tone pot is all the way up it bypasses the 56k ohm resistor, bypasses the strangle switch capacitor into the bridge pickup and back to ground.
So if I have the bridge pickup selected on the LEAD CIRCUIT and have the volume and tone full up, I should see the DC resistance of the bridge pickup. I read 1.063 M ohm!
This strongly implies that the bridge pickup is open circuit. I measure the same on the neck as well although it sounds normal (ish).
So I removed the pickups and, sure enough, both measure open circuit, so I have 2 'zombie' pickups.
They may make a sound but the DC resistance of the coil of each should act in parallel to bring the measured DC resistance at the output jack down to 6k or thereabouts which is the normal range of these pickups.
I have got Ash at Oil City Pickups to rewind both pickups as he has experience in rewinding Jaguar pickups and he rewound with vintage correct wire and black wax potting as original.
Now, black wax potting was meant to have ceased with the '50's Telecasters but, yes indeed, my pickups have this treatment. Despite what internet wisdom may suggest, so Ash is going to replicate the vintage original state and get them back to me. So another demo will be forthcoming.
So the neck pickup reading after the repair:
The neck pickup reads a healthy 6.65 k ohms and the bridge pickup reads 6.57 k ohms.
The installation process was simple enough. Just solder the ground connection to the brass shielding plate with new foam spacers, attach the hot witre to the appropriate lug on the switch: second switch along on the switch plate and the middle lug on the rhythm circuit switch for the neck.
Now the pickups read normally. I measured via the output socket and switched from the neck, bridge, both and off as seen below:
So this is what I expected. Before the readings were the same for all positions. Even when all were off. That just shows that the pickups were open circuit. It's strange that the neck pickup was sort of normal but the bridge was obviously thin and spiky. It didn't sound that good really and now it sounds full with proper levels of bass in the bridge position.
Another symptom was that when the tone control was turned down, the volume would shrink to nothing.
Thanks to Ash at Oil City Pickups for restoring the pickups to how they were with black wax potting. The coils look purple. Nice!
