So I received my used Elan pickups and electronics (Vol, blend, filter, and Q switch) in the mail. Made an easy repair to one of the pickup connectors, (resoldered the wires to the gold leads), and tested them. I connected a battery, tapped lightly on the pups, checked all the pots and the filter. Everything appeared to be in perfect order. There was a good S/N, plenty of gain, and the filter was doing what it's sposed to do.
This was followed by gentle handling as I tested the fit in the new control cavity, and the mounting in the pickguard that was made for this application.
Finally install the pups and the electronics, power them up, and there is very low output, the volume pot is making about 10 times more noise than when I first turned it, and after about 15 seconds of power, it starts to output this lovely, fuzzy, fluffy, white noise. Still low output from the pup under the noise, but a random, variable poofing over everything.
swapped pups, cleaned and exercised all the pins on the circuit board, and output jack. Installed another brand new battery.
The low output/white noise symptoms repeated another 3 or 4 times, with nice consistency. White noise remained when pups were disconnected.
So, it seems to me that I need to send this stuff into Alembic and hope for a simple solution/repair. But before I did that, I wanted to see if this scenario rings any bells in the collective cornucopia of wisdom, that is the Alembic forum. I've tried to cover all the bases, but......................
Thanks, JBY
Oh yeah, my magic touch, Within a few days of this unfortunate circumstance, I had removed a fully functional Bartolini pickup from one bass, and installed it in another. First test in the new bass revealed that there was no output for the D string. E, A, and G were there, a bit distorted, but nothing from the D. The magic touch........
(Message edited by jbybj on July 28, 2010)
