Special 22 Semi hollow bridge pickup issue

[Claude Tam]

guys, i just bought a new axe overseas from a USA store and the bridge pickup has almost no sound (like 1/20 of the normal volume) when it is in humbucking mode. No issue when it's on single core mode.

Any clue what could be wrong? The coil-tap switch? The pickup? the wiring? I'm devastated.

 

[Malloc]

Likely a short on the non-tapped coil.

Do you have a multimeter to ohm it out?

 

[Claude Tam]

Hi there, i do have a multimeter, but what shd i do? The mini toggle switch has 6 lugs. How do Zi test the ohm?

 

[Rider1260]

Take some good pictures of the control cavity and send an email to PRS customer service, they will get you sorted.

410-643-9970 or by email at [email protected].

 

[Malloc]

No need to poke at the switch yet you can check through the output with a regular instrument cable. Just set the pickup selector to bridge only, put one probe to the hot tip, put the other to ground sleeve, then take two readings: full humbucker and coil split. You should see somewhere around 8-9k for the humbucker mode and probably between 5-6k for the split mode.

If you have a short problem the humbucker mode will probably show very low impedance since it’s basically bypassing all the pickup wire.

Edit: also make sure your guitar volume knob is on 10 before measuring

 

[Claude Tam]

Take some good pictures of the control cavity and send an email to PRS customer service, they will get you sorted.

410-643-9970 or by email at [email protected].

Thx Rider.

Just checked the bridge pickup and the readings were: 6.00 kOHM for single Coil while 300k-ohm for Humbucking. The humbucking has minimal sound output and i wonder if it's the problem of the mini toggle swtich

 

[Claude Tam]

just tried to remove the back cover and poked the lugs of the mini toggle switch of the bridge pickup and miraculously it works now. any clue what went wrong?

 

[Malloc]

A picture of that mini toggle would be helpful to understand. The high impedance reading certainly aligns with a weak signal, but I'm honestly not sure where the extra ~292k of resistance is coming from.

 

[bodia]

just tried to remove the back cover and poked the lugs of the mini toggle switch of the bridge pickup and miraculously it works now. any clue what went wrong?

Maybe something was touching something it shouldn’t have? I bought a WL 509nthat has similar electronics that had a similar problem. There was a wire that came loose during shipping, but it also had a bad mini toggle switch. PRS Customer Service did an awesome job taking care of it. Even had Paul sign it before they sent it back to me.