wiring new harness in HSS strat - neck tone issues

[tomjonesrocks]

Wild stab - looking for wiring help. I am attempting to replace a harness in a HSS Squier 7 String Strat. I'm having tone control issues.

All 3 pickups "work". The humbucker and middle sound good - the neck pickup sounds like the tone is all the way off/down and neither of the 2 controls have an effect. The bottom tone control turns down the tone of the middle pickup and bridge humbucker. The tone knob in the middle does nothing. The volume knob works properly with all 3 pickups. In the diagram I was sent it seems like the bottom tone knob should affect the bridge and the middle tone knob should affect the neck and middle. The 5-way pickup switch selects the pickups as I'd want (all the way down is the bridge, in the middle is the middle, and up is the neck).

The harness specs are - Oak-Grigby 5 way Blade Switch / CTS 500 K Ohm Volume Control with Orange Drop Treble Bled Mod / 2 CTS 250 K Ohm Tone Controls with 1 "MOD" .047 Oil Filled Tone Capacitor (wired so that the tone capacitor works on both tone controls)

Editing as I Google guitar+multimeter...am not at all sure what this tells me...
Testing with a multimeter on the outer poles of the tone knobs:
- Lower Tone - .276
- Middle Tone - .257

Testing with a multimeter and guitar lead
- JB at Bridge reads 19.5 on the multimeter
- Middle Single coil reads 6.59
- Neck Single coil reads 6.52

Unsure what else to mention. All of the pickup grounds are soldered to the back of the volume knob. The jack ground is soldered to the bottom tone and the jack positive is soldered to volume. On the Seymour Duncan humbucker, the white and red wires are soldered together and taped off - the black goes to the switch and the green goes to ground.

Trying to attach pics but unsure what to offer

[The Dude]

A schematic, or even a wiring diagram of how you have the guitar wired, would help immensely.

[tomjonesrocks]

A schematic, or even a wiring diagram of how you have the guitar wired, would help immensely.

OK that's fair - I'm in out of my depth here but I am seeing some results for guitar wiring diagramming tools - if there's one you'd recommend let me know otherwise I'll see if I can work a diagram out...

[The Dude]

Also, at a glance, it looks like one or the other of your tone controls might be wired backwards. The tone pot lugs face each other, but the wires from switch to pot are both on the same side. Without some better pics or a diagram, that's all I can offer.

Edit: You can just hand draw a schematic or diagram and snap a picture. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Also, what is the purpose of the cap on the volume control?

Edit again for clarity: Your 2 tone controls appear to be wired differently. Both can't be right.

[tomjonesrocks]

Thanks so much for all of your replies here! I discovered that the capacitor on the middle pickup was wired to the same lug as the wire - moving the wire to the far right lug at least allowed the guitar to function.

How it works now is the middle tone controls the tone for the bridge and middle pickups - and the lower tone controls only the neck. Again this doesn't seem all that common a setup - but at least all 3 pickups work and sound good (to me) regardless of the weird tone knob mapping. May look into the latter issue more closely based on the posts above - Thanks again!