No Sound Issue from Nordstrand Preamp

[deepestend]

I hooked up a Nordstrand preamp to my P/Soap bass last night and I'm getting no sound output. I'm home watching sick kids today and won't get back to the shop for a little while to diagnose it there. If anyone has any quick tips, I'd appreciate it.

I hooked up everything exactly to this diagram: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1941/7837/files/3B-5b_epoxy.pdf?744051323792808354

I have tested continuity between the pots and jack and bridge and it's all connected. The battery tests out. I have reflowed all of the solder connections and tested them with a multi where applicable.

The one thing I didn't do is connect the center lug of the output jack to the control cavity shielding. The control cavity has shielding paint that links up the pickup cavities and the pickguard has copper tape.

I'm pretty sure that the pickups work, though one of the wires came off of one side of the P while I was putting it back in and I soldered it back. I have done that before and it's been fine, so I feel like I know what I'm doing there. The soap is brand new, so I think it should work, but I haven't tested it yet.

Any other quick tests I can do? I feel like there's just one thing shorting everything out that I'm not taking into account. I have been reading up on the archives here and have some thoughts on tests to take, but if anyone has thoughts, please share

 

[deepestend]

Okay, just tested the pickups... used alligator clips to wire them directly to a jack. The P-doesn't work. Opened it up and one of the wires snapped. Will fix that and proceed...

 

[deepestend]

Output jack was also not working properly... replaced that and tested the new one by clipping the pickups directly to it.

Put the bass all back together and it still doesn't work... time to hone in on the vol pot and the blend pot.

 

[deepestend]

Output jack was also not working properly... replaced that and tested the new one by clipping the pickups directly to it.

Put the bass all back together and it still doesn't work... time to hone in on the vol pot and the blend pot.

Last time in was the charm. Went through and reflowed it all including the jack connections and it's great now. The Nordstrand pre sounds really good in this bass.

Hadn't had to do this kind of detective work in a while, but I just grabbed mostly parts from my parts bin at home and it looks like I forgot why some of those parts went unused! Always good to flex the old problem solving skills to really dig in and figure out why something isn't working correctly and come up with another check list.