Although I think my guitar is rather Yamaki than Mat, I also try to find opinions here, hope that's ok!
Recently I was lucky to get hold of an old HB-35 DL (serial 83xxxx). Colour burgundy, wing headstock, wing inlays on fretboard, 5-piece-neck, string through bridge. Looks like this one
http://forums.washburn.com/index.php/to ... #msg129678Apart from dust and dirt the problem is, that only a very thin and weak sound comes out of the pickups when the small toggle switch is in middle position, in the other 2 positions the guitar is completely quiet (I don't mean the PU-selector switch, this model has 2 switches!). Since this guitar is active with an onboard PCB and battery I'd rather blame the electronics than the pickups themselves. I'm no electronic wizzard and if one of the components on the circuit board is broken, I don't see much chances for me to fix the problem. Additionaly it's a real pain to fumble with the pots and switches on a semihollow all through the f-hole
I would be quite happy if somebody could tell me what the controls and the 2nd toggle switch regulary should do. I don't think it's the "normal" 2-volume-2-tone setup. I've seen the wires going from the pickups to the pickup-selector toggle switch first, which to my poor knowledge this would mean that there can only be one volume/tone control, right? Thats also stated in this post
http://forums.washburn.com/index.php/to ... #msg105403So the other 2 controls would be frequency and gain? Think so. But what about the additional 3-way toggle switch? What's the funktion of the 3 positions? It's an on/on/on-style with 3 rows of contacts on the backside, each row has 4 contacts. That makes a lot of wires!!
My plan would be first to check the pickups by bypassing the electronics and going directly into the amp to see if they work as they should. Next I would try to change the pots. They maybe broken or damaged because my ohm-meter gives me other results than the writing on the pots says (two are 500k, one is 10k and one is 50k). If that also doesn't help then the PCB would be suspect Nr.1 for me. In this case I'd tend to forget about the PCB and wire it the classic way passive with 2 volume and 2 tone controls.
Any other ideas or suggestions?
Thanks in advance
guenter