Trying To Fix An Old Sears Electric Guitar That Just Buzzes!

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another cool guitar repair video for you this evening now I know what you're thinking boy that's turned up loud we'll get into that in a minute and the other thing you're thinking is normally this guy does arcade games pinball machines or jukebox repair videos and uh yeah normally we do but I've had this guitar laying around for a while that's got a weird problem and I got a bug to try to fix it tonight so we'll see if we can get this thing working so we're not really turned up that loud we're on like two or something I think let's see here look it don't even go to 11 this amp doesn't go all that loud people it's not that big of a deal what you're hearing is a really loud hum from this guitar now normally I don't really care if they're a little noisy I'm not a great guitar player anyway I'm a very very amateur remember this is amateur repair time okay so I not I don't even know how to play this thing but uh so normally I don't mind if it's a little noisy but this is ridiculous so I'm going to touch [Music] it oh we fixed it there we [Music] go I think the amp has a has a uh a touchy knob that that master volume knob at least it quieted down Force so basically this isn't amplifying anything whenever you whenever you touch the strings you get a different buzz but you you don't get any sound so it doesn't it doesn't actually pick up the strings um I'm wondering if it's the volume control and they've got a tone hat on it a volume and then another one here this is just some cheap Korean guitar it kind of I don't even know what it what it's supposed to be a copy of it kind of looks like a Mustang a Fender Mustang copy um I don't know but a Mustang doesn't have two humbuckers it's got two little regular size pickups and it only has one tone knob and one volume knob this one has three knobs so I don't know what they were trying to copy but this is a made in Korea special probably from the 70s maybe the 60s but these are my favorite types I like these a lot it doesn't have much value if you got it all fixed up and working good it might be worth a hundred bucks but um yeah so we're going to try to see if we can figure out um what the problem is let me let me get the amp turned back on and then we'll see if I can illustrate to you what's wrong with it so [Music] we get nothing if I touch anything metal we get a lot of humming right the middle knob here very hard to [Music] turn so I'm wondering if and I've never really taken one of these apart I'm wondering if the the pickups are fine and then there's just something wrong with the volume knob or I wonder if one of the lines to the the Jack has came came loose and only the ground's connected or maybe vice versa the ground's not connected and that's why we're getting [Music] that um um so yeah so that's what we're going to do I also need to clean it up ring it all that stuff so I'm going to go ahead and um take the strings off and then we'll take this plate off here which has most of our goodies on it and see what we can see what we can find out here we go all right so I took it apart and um here are the pickups they're not grounded in any way and I don't think that they can actually oh you know what they are actually they are grounded if you look so the yellow wire goes to the neck one and if you look it goes to this pot and there are actually two wires inside of that let's see if I can get get it where you can see it yeah so one is the ground and it's attached to the pot case and then the other is the signal and it goes to the uh middle leg of that pot okay and then the ground connects from there to here then you've got the this line is the other end of it right so then if you come over to this one it's the other pickup the white wire the ground inside the white wire connects to the case of the middle pot white wire is the middle leg the ground that attaches to that in pot goes to here over to here and then the white wire is attached here okay and then the volume I guess the volume po maybe I've got this wrong I'm going to look up how these are usually wired but it could be that these two are two different volume knobs one for each pickup and then there's a tone knob that affects both by putting this cap into play so you see the ground comes over to here oh and also on these on that pot notice how one of the legs they have soldered to the case on this one one of the legs they have soldered to the case and then on this one this leg they have soldered to the case and they also have a capacitor running between there and perhaps the middle leg there so what that would do I suppose is as you turn it it would either add in that cap or remove that cap okay so this black wire here the white wire there and the red wire there all connect over to the Jack and are connected together and then the ground is connected to the other end of the Jack so the jack is a ground and then the three outputs of volume volume and tone um so if this tone pot was bad it could be that it's just completely grounded I don't I don't know well most guitars if you turn turn the tone all the way one way it doesn't it doesn't uh kill it you know all right yeah so I'm going to go see how these are normally wired and then we're going to test these pots and uh see if we can clean them up get them to work and we're going to see if we can test the uh pickups and we'll go from there all right good people at guitar electronics.com go way out of their way to show you a bunch of different wiring diagrams and would you believe that a Fender Jazz Master Bas I think I got that right or a jazz bass guitar is wired exactly like this Korean guitar is wired so there's two Co there's two pickups they look like humbuckers but they I don't know you know they're just like this though they got a hot in the ground so if you look the the ground of each pickup goes to its volume case which is exactly what ours is doing there's two volumes and then there's one tone okay so the volume the the pickup goes to the center leg of the volume pot and the ground goes to the case the second pickup the ground goes to the case and the lead goes to the center leg and then there is one tone which I could kind of tell because I had that cap on it it made sense to me um there's one tone cap I mean One Tone pot and it has a cap going from an outside leg of the of the potentiometer to ground which is on the case of the potentiometer the ground from both pickups the tremolo all all three cases goes to the ground on the jack on the output and then strangely enough to me at least the one leg one side of the volume uh pot connects to the other side of the I mean the the same side of the other volume pot and connects to the center leg of the tone and all three of them connect to the output Jack on the guitar so it's wired slightly different as far as dressing like where the wires go but they all essentially are doing the same thing on ours these three have separate wires that all meet right here which is the same as having it Daisy chained like they've got it it may make it sound a little different and if we can't fix it we may try changing it like that because maybe there's some kind of interference or something but uh I think what the problem is going to be is that the uh two or three of these pots are screwed up so we might have to replace them but hopefully I can just clean them but it looks like it's wired correctly I'm going to go back and look at the tone pot again just to make sure but I think it I think they're wired properly at least like this Jazz Basse uh is wired on guitar electronics.com okay so it's a little bit different the Vol the two volumes are the same but this tone they've got a little different on the diagram that I was looking at they were telling you to run the cap between the outside leg in ground and then leave this outside leg open and then run this black line that's going up to here off of the middle leg but it looks like this is original I mean and I think I found the problem so if I check ground I've got it here and here and here here and here even but the ground is not on the cable if I check from the signal to the tip of the cable it's connected with the multimeter but if I check from the ground to the casing or the the other part of the the um guitar cable it is not connecting so even though it's through that hole the ground is not grounded so it could be that that thing is really rusty inside of there you can see this thing is not in the greatest shape obviously it's seen some humidity right the neck is pretty straight to be honest and uh the action's pretty nice on it it's not bad at all it I'm sure there's some Frets that buzz but people Eric Clapton cares of the Frets but I don't I'm not Eric come on people I can't play people it don't matter if the they're they're going see when I pray when I play I hit the wrong SP it buzzes anyway it don't matter if the Fret come on people all right so yeah I think it it might just be the the sleeve where the oh look there's rust too it's just rusted all to hell I think so let me try taking this out you'd think if I wiggled it though it would make it come in and out but let me try taking this out and uh seeing if I can figure out what's going on inside of it okay I've got the amp turned way down I cleaned the inside of the jack with a file and now when I check continuity I've got continuity between all of the grounds and the ground on the jack now I don't know how to really test this but it seems like when I when I hit these pi ups with this old string I'm getting something over there so I think we might be fixed so what I'll do I'm going to clean it up a little bit and I'm going to string one one string on it and let's see if it's amplifying one string she's cleaning up pretty good it's not perfect but pretty good needs a little hit oh what what is that it sounds like maybe it's amplifying a little [Music] bit [Music] I think we're getting there I can't tell if the tone is changing all right so that's the okay what are we doing here I guess if I look at the what the knob actually says that's up and that's up let's turn this one down Okay so this one's all the way up and then if you change the tone a little brighter okay so let's turn this one all the way down now we got nothing turn this one all the way [Music] up am I turning it the right way yeah that's up okay and so that's with both of them all right yeah so I think that was it it was just a bad connection on the jack so I probably could have fixed it without taking any apart just cleaning the inside of the Jack now next time I'll know if you get a really loud uh sound that sounds like the ground's not hooked up it probably isn't all right so let me clean it up some more and put the rest of the strings on all right so I have figured out what the guitar is it's made in Korea it is very similar to this one this is from the 1982 Sears Christmas book the difference between this one and mine is mine has a tremolo this is a copy of the the I don't know how you pronounce it TCO tysco um 1405 so mine on the headstock says 14051 instead of 1405 and then it also says made in Korea instead of made in Japan so t TCO Tesco Tesco was a Japanese guitar company that made um guitars up until the late 60s when they were bought out by Kawai which is a keyboard company so uh Sears had a long history of selling guitars and most of them they put silver tone on but in the in the 80s uh they were no longer branding them as silver tones but they were still selling tons of guitars at Sears um the silver tone guitar was never actually made by Sears it was made by other companies and they just put silver tone on it so Dan Electro made some back in the day K made some back in the day and this company uh Tesco tysco the Japanese company made them for them in the60s this is exactly like a I'm butchering their name I'm sure a Tesco tysco 1405 but mine says 14051 which must be the one that they added the tremolo to so this is 1982 um oh let me show you the what it says and the part number if I can get it to go down to it here we go electric guitar for beginners construction two pickups two tone and one volume control now keep in mind we just proved mine's two volume control and one tone hardwood body with black to Red to Yellow Sunburst neck reinforced with adjustable Steel Rod hardwood fingerboard with inlaid position marking markers six steel strings adjustable Bridge imported okay now look at the part number 1405 C okay so this is 1982 okay so here's the 1983 Christmas catalog it's basically just a almost exact copy of a a Tyco Tesco 1405 so was Kawai still making them but had started making them in Korea instead maybe so this is 83 same guitar basically so here is the actual Japanese version the the the T version from the 60s it's a 55914 5 so this is the actual Japanese one and it does has be similarities to Fender stuff so it's you know I looked up the fender uh J the Fender Jazz Bass that they're talking about and it looks really similar to this but of course this is a guitar not a bass and if you notice they've got this fixed bridge but this is identical the pickups are identical we got the three um knobs here which are labeled volume volume volume tone so they keep insisting at Sears that it's two tones in a volume but the Japanese one wasn't so I don't know I think the guys at Sears may have never actually played the thing and know that they're are two volumes in One Tone but whatever whatever what do I know okay so this is the actual Japanese one and so we're trying to get to the 1985 series Christmas catalog all right so here is their 85 catalog and they are advertising a court guitar so they were working with court at the time and I think that one says harmony I think so Sears was uh having their line made by court and Harmony at the time and there we go so it's the same guitar but they have put a tremolo on it you see the three knobs and they appear to say volume volume tone once again they have no clue what their their own product is uh the pickups are the exact ones that are on [Music] mine the S I think that's called the saddle the saddle is the same I'm missing my whammy bar I'll have find one of those right the head is the same see the little uh the little metal piece there that holds the two strings the two high strings see the white around the tuners and then here's what they call it built for strength to withstand hard use this low priced electric guitar is a tough value to beat adjust tone and octave while playing with swing adjust tone and octave while playing with swing arm triolo dual pickups one Volume One Tone control adjustable Bridge polyester finish hardwood neck 10ft amp cord neck strap pick instructions including now look at the number 1451 that's mine that's the one that I'll show you the sticker on the back of mine so apparently this guitar is about a 1985 Sears model that might have been made by court or Harmony uh and it's a it's a pretty solid copy of the Tesco Japanese 1405 even basically the same part number so there must have been some deal there with them they they couldn't have just surely they didn't just steal the design and even keep the same part number okay so here's the 86 catalog and they've changed it to a different brand this one has a built-in speaker um and they changed some stuff around so the the one I've got must have been made in 84 or 85 and they are advertised in some of their electric stuff as being made by Court um so I would guess BBE Court that's a court made guitar this one here which is like a strat copy has the same headstock basically it's very Sim well it's a little different oh who knows it it doesn't really matter it's a Sears and robu from 85 so here's the back made in Korea 55914 five and then there's an extra one at the end so I believe this is a court made Sears and robu uh copy of the Tesco tysco uh guitar which was basically the exact same one but this one has a tremolo on it I'm going to get a tremolo bar to put on it and um so I can give it that wobble that it wants right but it's got a little chip on the fretboard where a piece of it came off that's a shame but looks pretty good not not a bad little guitar so this is what we ended up with after cleaning it up stringing it up so I'm going to order the tremolo bar and I'm going to order three uh new uh knobs two volume and a tone I think I'll just order them black just like that just try to make it look how it originally looked um a little rusty so there you go folks if you like the video leave your comments below let us know what you think make sure to check out my brother Donnie's Channel if you don't know about my brother Donnie he has a channel here on YouTube as well we we uh on this channel usually we do arcade games pinball machines and Juke boxes so we'll see you back Tuesday with another arcade game video this this week um but my brother Donnie works on Old Vehicles old buildings and has a farm so what do you think should we try to play it now I am not a great guitarist folks but you know this cheap guitar I think might have a little life left in it what do you think I bet you you uh guitar guys want to see the and girls want to see the action on it right that's not bad I was able to get it pretty decent it's at about 3 mm little high maybe just a little bit but here I'll there very playable like I said I'm not a great guitarist but I can uh all I'll you know this is amateur repair time people now you going to have to cut me some slack here okay but I'll see I mean I got some blisters on my fingers you know I'll give it a go I'll see if I can make it make some uh I'll see if I can bring her back to life a little bit here we go [Music] n [Music] [Music] the [Music] the to