Cort Space wiring issue

[tauzero]

My new to me Cort Space proved to have some issue as with the blend control in the middle, the sound was quiet, thin, and nasal, whereas at either end the full goodness of one pickup or the other could be heard. I thought that it was a pickup wired out of phase, so I opened it up.

 

 

Knobs held on with hex grub screws, one Allen key and it's off. Not quite enough wiggle room to pull out just the blend, so also unleashed the volume control. Both pots had a pair of shakeproof washers on. I examined the wiring and it seemed fine, but the terminals of the dual gang pot were very close together and seemed to be touching. I separated them and retested, and all was now well. I added a little insulating tape to try and prevent a recurrence.

 

 

I reassembled it, tightening up the jack socket nut as I did so, and retested. Silence. I noticed I'd broken an earth wire to the volume pot, so resoldered that and tested again. Silence. And then I noticed that when I'd tightened up the jack socket nut, I'd turned the jack socket, and it had ended up with the tip contact pressed firmly against the body of the rightmost EQ pot. Loosened jack socket nut off, turned it so it wasn't in contact, and retightened. I now got the correct type of noise, so buttoned everything back up again.
 

[tauzero]

This has now taken a sharp left turn into the Twilight Zone.

 

All was working fine yesterday (or I thought it was). Today, both pickups work fine individually, but when blended, the G and D strings are fine but the A, E, and B strings all sound thin and nasal. Bartolini MK-2 pickups - are they split like P pickups, and is there a tap point which might somehow have gone wrong? It's as if half the split on one pickup was in one phase and the other half in the other.

[tauzero]

Well, that's further bafflement. There's heatshrink over the end of the outer insulation on the pickup leads, which I thought might contain the ends of each pickup winding, like on the BH2 pickups. No such luck. Slit the heatshrink and it just covers where the cable screen is run into a separate sleeve. No access to the internal coils. So I need at least one replacement MK1.

[tauzero]

I did a swap of a pair of Bart BH2s from an Ibanez EHB for a pair of Bart MK5CBCs, which had been permanently wired as parallel. I thought I'd make them switchable so got some 4-core cable and re-rewired them, drilled holes for and connected up the toggle switches, got silence, realised I hadn't connected the pickups on the ground side, sorted that out, and now I have proper sound. Woo hoo.