This was on my bench when I arrived at work this morning (picture taken after repairs and setup):
It's a PAN (re-badged Aria 1502??) which has appeared on these Forum several times:
The owner dropped it off yesterday (no case
) and asked if it could be repaired. The problem? Horrendous buzzing whenever the pickups or hardware was touched. Obviously some sort of grounding issue. Not so obvious was what was causing it.
I started with the selector and slider switch package (which is a very scary looking assembly!). Nothing unusual there except some insulation brittleness which I taped over, plus a lot of dust and general crud. Cleaned up OK. No change.
On to the pots and a look at the wiring inside. Cleaned. No change.
OK then, must be the pups:
First glance, looked OK...then I noticed the way the wiring was attached to the coil was unusual. The coil wire was a attached to a terminal strip and right next to it, the ground wire to its own terminal. What was weird was that the backside of the ground lug was not soldered into the plate as you might expect. Instead, there was a small square hole punched into the copper back plate into which a matching lug on the terminal strip was originally push-fit. A dry connection!
As I looked at this more closely, I realized that the lugs had all dropped out of the plate causing a massive short. My quick n dirty repair was to solder in a small jumper wire from the terminal lug to the plate (2 shown here in red, 1 in white. The orange circle indicates the small mounting hole in the plate):
The wires have the added benefit of stabilizing the connection as a whole thus preventing any further movement and potential breakage of the hot wire to the coil.
One last item of interest. The pickups are mounted on mahogany rings of varying thicknesses in order to attain the correct height:
Thought this might be helpful to any PAN owners out there who might be struggling with a buzzing problem.
p.s. This 'ole gal also suffered from some higher than comfortable action.
A look at the neck plate revealed that somebody had been tinkering with the neck before, since the plate had been installed upside down.
When I dropped the neck it revealed the original Mats shim plus a round cocktail toothpick...in front of it!! No idea what the fool was thinking there.
I replaced both with a suitably thicker plastic shim and now she plays like butta!