John Hendow

Last night I performed some necessary maintenance on my primary electric guitar, which happens to be a Fender Stratocaster. The output jack has been intermittent since last month and I wasn’t going to risk playing another gig without fixing it. Testing with a continuity meter didn’t immediately reveal the issue and I knew it was going to require some disassembly to diagnose it. When I removed the jack plate and inspected the soldering and wires it wasn’t immediately apparent that anything was wrong, but I went ahead and replaced the jack. I made two important discoveries in the process. First, the existing jack had a slight rattle, and when tested with the meter it showed a poor connection between the body and the ground lug. This was the source of my intermittent output. The second discovery was that the routing in guitar body underneath the jack plate was pretty tight. So after I replaced the jack and reinstalled the plate, there wasn’t quite enough clearance for the phone plug to easily fit inside the routed cavity. It worked if forced into the jack, but this put pressure on the jack body, which is probably why the internal connection failed on the previous jack. After a few minutes of adjustment I discovered it was barely possible to make it fit, provided the jack was rotated to a specific angle before being tightened in the jackplate housing.

So the problem is rectified for the moment, but ultimately I need to rout a little more wood from one end of the existing cavity. It’s a problem I’ll solve at a later date. For the moment, the black strat is ready for gig action and that’ll get me through this weekend’s show.

My next guitar repair project involved my backup strat, which needs several things done. I’ll probably get around to that project next weekend.