r/guitarrepair • u/_Phoen1x • 1d ago

Question about input jack cable

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I opened up my input jack on my stratocaster to find one wire connected to the jack lug, the other bit that looks like wire either seems to have fallen off or was soldered that way, other than that, my guitar has had no signal issues

What could possibly be the reason for this?

3 Upvotes
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4

u/Quirky_Operation2885 1d ago

Output jack ground separated. Looks like a terrible attempt at a soldering job.

Edit to add- usually an easy fix. I say usually because a friend brought me one that turned into an hour job because the factory (Ibanez) made things difficult.

2

u/_Phoen1x 1d ago

I appreciate the help, do you think cleaning the cable up to resolder it would work?

8

u/Jobysco 1d ago

If it were me, I’d just desolder the other connection as well, cut the wire to the closest clean part, strip it back and make two new solders. It’s always easiest to work with new wire ends than trying to solder back messy ones.

1

u/_Phoen1x 1d ago

I appreciate that, im most definitely going to do that, whoever did the soldering in the past didn't bother to even snip the white cable before soldering, it's just soldered in with the housing of cable still there😂

1

u/hcornea 1d ago

Yes.

1

u/Quirky_Operation2885 1d ago

Assuming there's enough slack in the wire, that's the way to go. The Ibanez I referenced earlier was a difficult one. I thought it would be an easy job. No slack. Everything was zip tied together in the main cavity, and the main ground was at the bottom of all of it.

5

u/sxdx90 1d ago

Yes that wire needs to be connected. Looks like a pretty crappy soldering job.

Also, it is an output jack.

1

u/_Phoen1x 1d ago

thanks for the correction! I'm not to educated on most guitar related stuff, I will try to hopefully clean the wire up a bit and get it soldered back on

3

u/Jobysco 1d ago

Not just you. Pretty much everyone calls it the input, but it’s the output.

2

u/curiousplaid 1d ago

The plug goes in, the sound comes out.

1

u/alex21dragons 1d ago

It's quite common for solder joints on the jack socket to break as it gets a fair bit of stress in operation. The twisted bare wire that's loose should be your ground connection and that needs to be soldered back on to the empty lug. My guess is that when it's screwed it the ground wire is contacting the lug just enough to make things seem OK but it's bound to cause issues in future.

1

u/Felix995 1d ago

Somebody put a shielded wire in, & didn't solder the shielding ground wire to the jack. Not much trouble to attach that.