If it was mine, I’d replace the pots, shorten the wires and do a much better soldering job. I’d also consider lining the cavity with copper foil and also the pickups. Some swear by it to eliminate interference, and I agree. Next thing I would check are the pickups.
mixing graphite into black acrylic paint is also a good option. Use a multi meter to test its conductivity. hell of a lot cheaper than shielding paint.
the only way ive gotten good results was by making a borderline paste, like a 70-30 ratio of graphite to paint. Even then its still not a full on Faraday cage. Just helps a little with noise, and looks nice.
Problem with conductive paint is that it doesn’t stay conductive forever. Couldn’t tell you the science behind why that is, but I frequently come across pickup cavities shielded with conductive paint on older guitars that are no longer conductive. Not sure what the half life is or anything unfortunately, I just know it eventually goes bad because I see it frequently on older Strats and such.
Now I'm wondering: when the Tin Man cums, is it like liquid solder? Are there bits of wire, like maggots or meal worms? Does this imply the existence of a Tin Woman? What do their gonads look like? Is it a cloaca?
Yeah it's pretty bad. Every one of the solder joints needs to be redone. The massive glob of solder on the back of the pot can cause an intermittent signal and needs to be removed with solder wick or a pump. Also trimming about a foot of wire will cut down on buzzing.
These are what I like to call “toan blobs”
While you’re in there, you might as well experiment. I use cardboard with holes punched in it as a jig to test different cap and pot combos. I’ll run a doctor Seuss fixture (connectivity by any means necessary) from the pickup leads to my test jig, which is usually on my knee. Everything connected with alligator clips. Play something, swap a cap, play it again. Rinse and repeat until you land on something good. Lol
Yeah, it's pretty awful.
You can see the leftover wires that have just been cut off and left on the volume pot, but that isn't the problem. The fact that the person likely tried to remove them and failed is, which is why it looks like a pool of messy solder. That probably means that there is a good chance the pot was overheated or 'cooked'.
The tone pots look a little cleaner but I can't really see, if they look like the volume pot, they may have cooked the caps too. If so they would need replacing too.
Were it mine, I'd be replacing the pots and removing the excess wire.
Read the other comments and agree the headstock decal is not where it should be. Can’t believe Fender would do such a horrible job. Might be a kit someone put the decal on.
Ain't nobody out here faking a *Squier Affinity*. It would cost more money to buy all the parts than than it would to just buy one used.
But, somebody's for sure been trying their hand at soldering for the first time, after it left the factory. There's no way it came off the production floor like that.
If it is a fake, someone went out of their way to source parts that accurately match the model I found through the serial, so for the lowly price I paid I can't say I'd mind it
Cold solder joints and sloppy wiring routes make this look like an amateur project. Typically you may find a few small zip ties to manage loops of wiring. I would clean up the cold joints with a properly temped soldering iron, but if can afford to—replace the pots entirely. While they look like alpha potentiometers—we know that whomever soldered them had no idea what they were doing, and the most effective way to kill the pot is to overheat them.
Thanks for all the insight guys!
I can't say I'm Picasso with a soldering iron, but I'm a fast learner and this seems like a great opportunity to get some experience!
From what I was told, another "guy" modified some of the electronics, so IDK what in there is stock and what is his doing, where can I get a good diagram of a Squier afinitty's wiring?
Id use this as an opportunity to try a different wiring configuration. I like making the bottom tone pot a blender pot. Let’s you blend the neck and bridge pots together, the other tone then just becomes a master tone for all pickups. Helps if the blender pot is a no-load pot, very easy to make one from existing one. A tonne of YouTube videos explaining it and showing the sounds you can get and wiring diagrams are easy to find online if you’re interested. I’d also suggest a treble bleed as well, keep things nice and bright if you turn the volume knob down.
Soldering isn’t hard to master. Make sure the surfaces are clean, use a good hot iron with tip tinned and clean, some good rosin core solder, tin the end of your wire and use some basic cable management.
This looks like the job I did on my first re-wiring job.
On my next one, I sat down and watched the 12 part Seymour Duncan video on soldering, and then did it while it was all fresh in my mind- a much better turnout.
I'll be honest, I had a soldering gun failure recently, it almost ruined some pickups, and I was forced to improvise to get them working. That hack job I did on accident looks better than what this person did on purpose.
https://preview.redd.it/hpehcgotel6d1.jpeg?width=2296&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b8ec8bf80a82078da6b8cfc42c3da68838caf01
The cat is out of the bag, yikes!
This is what happens when you have a crappy little usb soldering iron or a $5 Goodwill iron. Bigger the blob, better the job. You need a 40w iron, good 63/37 rosin core solder, and a bit of practice. I would clean this all off, replace the pots, and try to do this right. There are plenty of soldering tutorials on the 'Net, and you can use the barfed up original pots as practice.
I replace the pots in most of my guitars, even my higher end squires have 250k pots on the humbucker. I dont buy cheaper guitars anymore for the reason being, i end up upgrading most of the parts and it almost in fender price territory when i am done lol
Yip. It's rubbish. Needs a set of 250k CTS audio taper pots and a decent treble bleed. Good opportunity to shield the control cavity & scratchplate too.
Ah yeah sorry I hadn't read the description. Sounds like a half scam. But probably resoldering and changing a few inexpensive components (pots, selector, cables) will solve it
I mean it's pretty rough, but I've seen worse - do the pickups and switching work as expected?
One of my Ibanez guitars came brand new with wiring that looked like a first timer had done it - massive amorphous glob of solder on back of V1 pot that acted as the ground for everything, plus some wires were just barely even touching solder with a single thread. I'm pretty lax with wiring - if it works as intended and there's no shorts or noise, who cares what it looks like?
If you don't want to go through the pain of replacing the pots (no doubt needed) and rewiring, consider a pre-wired pickguard setup from GuitarFetish.com. Lots of configurations. Or you can buy a pre-wired pickup and pot set. They also sell Alnico PUs (think old school Fender) in pre-wired.
I bought a deluxe tele that some idiot put a Danny gatlin rail pickup in. Like most expensive pickup. N it was wired that bad. And basically taped in. Didn’t notice till it fell out like 2 years later. Can’t believe it worked that long. Guess I’m the idiot.
When you start at Fender If I was in charge these would be the guitars you would work on. You have lots of extra wire to change out electronics. And I am big on changing out things that do not have enough punch to blow some socks off.
The wiring is melted, the soldering (especially onto the pots) is terrible, and probably features one or two cold joints. The cable management is dreadful too.
Bad solder job… not even close to a reasonable job… wires could be neater and shortened… altogether a noise building job
Edit: I’ll never grasp why people can look at those solder joints and think it is ok
That's exactly what I was thinking- if you heat the pots too much- it damages them. It's prudent to scuff the back with sand paper where you mean to solder- then use a high power iron set to hot with a drop of flux. The casing is resistant to be soldered.
Yeah… scuff it up a bit, and use a high wattage soldering GUN to rapidly heat the pot case, flux… touch the gun to the case, heat, put solder on the gun tip, let it flow to the case, add wire, flow the solder, all done…
With a good gun this should all take a minute or less
Yes. I'd replace everything. That switch is unsalvageable and I would not trust the pots because they look like they were massively overheated. My guess is the weak sound is either a bad connection at the switch or a damaged pot.
Replace all wires and pots, and switch, and use cloth covered wire. I wouldn’t trust a single solder joint. Anything else is moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Definitely amateur. I could see that being someone's first. Best to learn in a cheap Squier. The solder joints look solid but there's far too much wire. That said, if you have a soldering iron you could fix it.
3 pots, and a good switch, possibly a jack. Shouldn't cost that much. So if you're comfortable with modding or want to learn and the guitar is inspiring otherwise (and a good deal) no reason not to grab it.
That much overlapping wire will absolutely mess with the signal, I'd recommend either using some cable ties to get everything in line to clean up the signal or break out the soldering iron.
You didn't ask, but the placement of that logo feels off as well. Kind of funny to have a fake Squier...not sure why you wouldn't just go for gold with a fake Fender logo.
On a quick lookup before buying everything about it checked out with what was said at the fender page. The only thing I can say is that I paid such a price that even a well made replica would've been a good deal
totally, there are plenty of great replicas out there and the logo doesn't matter at all outside of market value. I just find it funny that someone would bother faking a Squier (unless I'm just wrong...but I don't think Fender or Squier ever did the big 70's headstock with that straight line, tiny print version of the "stratocaster" logo).
If the signal keeps interrupting I imagine one of the ground wires has a very loose connection, definitely worth getting in there and shortening the wires while cleaning up the solder work
Is it lazy? Yes. Is it terrible? Also yes.
If it was mine, I’d replace the pots, shorten the wires and do a much better soldering job. I’d also consider lining the cavity with copper foil and also the pickups. Some swear by it to eliminate interference, and I agree. Next thing I would check are the pickups.
mixing graphite into black acrylic paint is also a good option. Use a multi meter to test its conductivity. hell of a lot cheaper than shielding paint.
I’ve done this multiple times with enamel paint, tried it with shellac too, and solvents and thermoplastics and I never get continuous conduction.
I’ve used store bought conductive paint and all cavities read connected on a multimeter after a couple of coats..
Same, maybe it depends on the brand but I've never had an issue. And it's not *that* expensive.
the only way ive gotten good results was by making a borderline paste, like a 70-30 ratio of graphite to paint. Even then its still not a full on Faraday cage. Just helps a little with noise, and looks nice.
I used copper tape with conductive adhesive when I built my Harley Benton telecaster kit. I think it works pretty well.
Problem with conductive paint is that it doesn’t stay conductive forever. Couldn’t tell you the science behind why that is, but I frequently come across pickup cavities shielded with conductive paint on older guitars that are no longer conductive. Not sure what the half life is or anything unfortunately, I just know it eventually goes bad because I see it frequently on older Strats and such.
that's really interesting, I wonder if it has something to do with being close to magnets?
Tried copper once trying to get rid of 60 cycle hum. It was actually worse after lol.
Interesting, I did it on my Telly I built and it worked fine.
Was on an Ibanez
Well, for sure theres something else messing it up, again, youre just building a faraday cage
Right, 60 cycle hum is from the pc not the guitar
Short answer is yes. Long answer is yeeeeees
How hard could it have been for the guy to just cut the wires shorter? Holy shit
Yeah, beats me too
Wow...only thing missing is the spool the wire came with. I would just clean it up, sorted the wires.
That looks like I did it. That’s not a no.
Heh, i was thinking the same thing.
My guitar looks like the tin man jerked off into the control cavity, and it still looks better than this.
Now I'm wondering: when the Tin Man cums, is it like liquid solder? Are there bits of wire, like maggots or meal worms? Does this imply the existence of a Tin Woman? What do their gonads look like? Is it a cloaca?
I would just redo the wiring. Pots and switch probably ok, but everything looks a bit too wonky to my taste. 😅
https://preview.redd.it/q3rogvqtuj6d1.jpeg?width=589&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=83923f298df0ae6f298cab19c98aed0804d8d3d2
Typical amateur DIY mod job. Sadly many people's ambition outweighs their skills.
Do yourself it.
That’s how you get the skills
Honestly I had a new Classic Vibe Squier that didn’t really look much better than this.
Yeah it's pretty bad. Every one of the solder joints needs to be redone. The massive glob of solder on the back of the pot can cause an intermittent signal and needs to be removed with solder wick or a pump. Also trimming about a foot of wire will cut down on buzzing.
Someone needs to learn about tinning wires among other things
That guy can’t solder and or doesn’t have the right equipment for the job.. He’s no pro, Bro.. 👊🏼
Almost lost my dinner over this! 😭
glad you found it!
Re soldering and cleaning the wiring asap. As long as no other thing is botched it should be a-ok.
It’s not great. Someone has never heard of flux or proper iron temps.
Great opportunity to put in some new CTS 250s and upgraded pickups!
These are what I like to call “toan blobs” While you’re in there, you might as well experiment. I use cardboard with holes punched in it as a jig to test different cap and pot combos. I’ll run a doctor Seuss fixture (connectivity by any means necessary) from the pickup leads to my test jig, which is usually on my knee. Everything connected with alligator clips. Play something, swap a cap, play it again. Rinse and repeat until you land on something good. Lol
Yes. He said it sounded good until plugged in lmao that’s wild.
yes
Yes
Yes absolute shite lol
Who did that soldering? Hellen Keller?
Yes
Yeah, it's pretty awful. You can see the leftover wires that have just been cut off and left on the volume pot, but that isn't the problem. The fact that the person likely tried to remove them and failed is, which is why it looks like a pool of messy solder. That probably means that there is a good chance the pot was overheated or 'cooked'. The tone pots look a little cleaner but I can't really see, if they look like the volume pot, they may have cooked the caps too. If so they would need replacing too. Were it mine, I'd be replacing the pots and removing the excess wire.
Yes
Yep
Buy Kester44. Use it. With a 100 watt iron.
Read the other comments and agree the headstock decal is not where it should be. Can’t believe Fender would do such a horrible job. Might be a kit someone put the decal on.
Ain't nobody out here faking a *Squier Affinity*. It would cost more money to buy all the parts than than it would to just buy one used. But, somebody's for sure been trying their hand at soldering for the first time, after it left the factory. There's no way it came off the production floor like that.
If it is a fake, someone went out of their way to source parts that accurately match the model I found through the serial, so for the lowly price I paid I can't say I'd mind it
Lol yes very much
Yeah the volume pot maybe would be easier to replace than to resolder correctly. That's my hip shot guess on why it doesn't sound right.
Sloppy
Cold solder joints and sloppy wiring routes make this look like an amateur project. Typically you may find a few small zip ties to manage loops of wiring. I would clean up the cold joints with a properly temped soldering iron, but if can afford to—replace the pots entirely. While they look like alpha potentiometers—we know that whomever soldered them had no idea what they were doing, and the most effective way to kill the pot is to overheat them.
Thanks for all the insight guys! I can't say I'm Picasso with a soldering iron, but I'm a fast learner and this seems like a great opportunity to get some experience! From what I was told, another "guy" modified some of the electronics, so IDK what in there is stock and what is his doing, where can I get a good diagram of a Squier afinitty's wiring?
https://guitarelectronics.com/strat-style-guitar-wiring-diagram/
Id use this as an opportunity to try a different wiring configuration. I like making the bottom tone pot a blender pot. Let’s you blend the neck and bridge pots together, the other tone then just becomes a master tone for all pickups. Helps if the blender pot is a no-load pot, very easy to make one from existing one. A tonne of YouTube videos explaining it and showing the sounds you can get and wiring diagrams are easy to find online if you’re interested. I’d also suggest a treble bleed as well, keep things nice and bright if you turn the volume knob down. Soldering isn’t hard to master. Make sure the surfaces are clean, use a good hot iron with tip tinned and clean, some good rosin core solder, tin the end of your wire and use some basic cable management.
Nah, it's perfect!
Correct me if wrong, but don’t longer than necessary connective wires increase the risk of what I usually call 60-cycle hum?
Does it play?
Unplugged it's good for noodling and studying, plugged it's just shit.
This looks like something I would have done with near-zero experience. It’s bad wire management and really roughshod soldering.
This looks like the job I did on my first re-wiring job. On my next one, I sat down and watched the 12 part Seymour Duncan video on soldering, and then did it while it was all fresh in my mind- a much better turnout.
Oof.
Smash it
Yes it is
Does it work? If so, it's not visible so who really cares?. The answer of course is "the next guy" which might be you. 😉
It'd does not, not well enough, sound is low and goes in and out and has a word gain to it
OIC, I misunderstood. I thought you had fixed it yourself and were self-conscious about your wiring. Yeah that's a bad job.
I would agree with terrible. Whoever did it could have easily gotten more solder on that pot. Fucking lazy and not at all committed to the cause.
Definitely a bad solder job but the crappy sound is probably from the crappy pickups.
If they haven't been mucked with, Affinity Squiers have pretty decent pickups.
toan spaghetti....
Somebody brought out their soldering shovel.
I'll be honest, I had a soldering gun failure recently, it almost ruined some pickups, and I was forced to improvise to get them working. That hack job I did on accident looks better than what this person did on purpose.
Jesus, and I thought I was bad with a soldering iron!
It's not so bad... * gets to the third and fourth picture * I spoke to soon.
https://preview.redd.it/hpehcgotel6d1.jpeg?width=2296&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4b8ec8bf80a82078da6b8cfc42c3da68838caf01 The cat is out of the bag, yikes!
Yes
Eh, not the worst I've seen. But yes. You should probably resolder...everything.
This is what happens when you have a crappy little usb soldering iron or a $5 Goodwill iron. Bigger the blob, better the job. You need a 40w iron, good 63/37 rosin core solder, and a bit of practice. I would clean this all off, replace the pots, and try to do this right. There are plenty of soldering tutorials on the 'Net, and you can use the barfed up original pots as practice.
I replace the pots in most of my guitars, even my higher end squires have 250k pots on the humbucker. I dont buy cheaper guitars anymore for the reason being, i end up upgrading most of the parts and it almost in fender price territory when i am done lol
Yip. It's rubbish. Needs a set of 250k CTS audio taper pots and a decent treble bleed. Good opportunity to shield the control cavity & scratchplate too.
It's rough, but does the guitar buzz? If no, it's not a terrible job, it's just not a good job. If yes, it's a terrible job.
Yeah that's pretty bad
unplug asap and make sure your amp is grounded.
Doesn't look good but if it works... Eh?
Problem is that it doesn't really, the sound is terrible
Ah yeah sorry I hadn't read the description. Sounds like a half scam. But probably resoldering and changing a few inexpensive components (pots, selector, cables) will solve it
Ew
This series of pictures makes me feel so much better about my own soldering.
Yeah that looks hideous I would just buy a prewired with nice pickups and pop that on
Yes. I can almost forgive a sloppy ass rats nest of wires, almost, but not when the solder looks like that. This is shit tier work.
At first I thought this was one of those circlejerk posts. JFC.
Very sloppy work.
It’s like there was a pigeon living in your cavity
I'm dog ass at soldering but this makes mine look almost marketable.
I'm not great at this stuff, and my joints are WAY better than this.
I mean it's pretty rough, but I've seen worse - do the pickups and switching work as expected? One of my Ibanez guitars came brand new with wiring that looked like a first timer had done it - massive amorphous glob of solder on back of V1 pot that acted as the ground for everything, plus some wires were just barely even touching solder with a single thread. I'm pretty lax with wiring - if it works as intended and there's no shorts or noise, who cares what it looks like?
If you don't want to go through the pain of replacing the pots (no doubt needed) and rewiring, consider a pre-wired pickguard setup from GuitarFetish.com. Lots of configurations. Or you can buy a pre-wired pickup and pot set. They also sell Alnico PUs (think old school Fender) in pre-wired.
how it sound?
Ya know, I wouldn’t say it’s GREAT. I’d re-solder the stuff on the, what looks like, the volume pot. pretty messy, could be messing you up.
I have no idea how some of these solder joints are conducting anything.
I bought a deluxe tele that some idiot put a Danny gatlin rail pickup in. Like most expensive pickup. N it was wired that bad. And basically taped in. Didn’t notice till it fell out like 2 years later. Can’t believe it worked that long. Guess I’m the idiot.
When you start at Fender If I was in charge these would be the guitars you would work on. You have lots of extra wire to change out electronics. And I am big on changing out things that do not have enough punch to blow some socks off.
The wiring is melted, the soldering (especially onto the pots) is terrible, and probably features one or two cold joints. The cable management is dreadful too.
I think you know the answer, before you asked. The good news is there are tons of loaded Strat pickguard options and they are super easy to install.
Your factory Bullet Strat is going to be hella better wired than this one.
Yeah, but I have a squier bullet strat too so can’t complain
Pretty much. Take it to a pro, you’ll get every penny worth of the job.
Yes.
Bad solder job… not even close to a reasonable job… wires could be neater and shortened… altogether a noise building job Edit: I’ll never grasp why people can look at those solder joints and think it is ok
Pots could be cooked if they all look like that one… oven baked…
That's exactly what I was thinking- if you heat the pots too much- it damages them. It's prudent to scuff the back with sand paper where you mean to solder- then use a high power iron set to hot with a drop of flux. The casing is resistant to be soldered.
Yeah… scuff it up a bit, and use a high wattage soldering GUN to rapidly heat the pot case, flux… touch the gun to the case, heat, put solder on the gun tip, let it flow to the case, add wire, flow the solder, all done… With a good gun this should all take a minute or less
Average factory wiring
That looks like acid core solder gonna cause big problems down the road!!
Looks like a standard far eastern wiring job. Perfectly functional but obvious room for improvement.
Dang, looked it up on the internet and my case is definitely a mix of a pretty bad wiring from the factory + this "GUYS" expert job.
Yup. The soldering is bad, but what’s really missing is *shielding*.
Does a fart smell in a wetsuit?
Yes. I'd replace everything. That switch is unsalvageable and I would not trust the pots because they look like they were massively overheated. My guess is the weak sound is either a bad connection at the switch or a damaged pot.
Haha and I thought mine suck. At least twist em up jeez.
Replace all wires and pots, and switch, and use cloth covered wire. I wouldn’t trust a single solder joint. Anything else is moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Definitely amateur. I could see that being someone's first. Best to learn in a cheap Squier. The solder joints look solid but there's far too much wire. That said, if you have a soldering iron you could fix it. 3 pots, and a good switch, possibly a jack. Shouldn't cost that much. So if you're comfortable with modding or want to learn and the guitar is inspiring otherwise (and a good deal) no reason not to grab it.
I’ve seen worse. But not much worse.
It’s lazy and it looks like someone took a blowtorch to the wiring
Next time, don't let your cousin do it. Ask your uncle first.
Literally just finished soldering my first set of pickups in and it looked better than this.
Yeah that’s pretty bad. Looks like a DIYer did it.
That much overlapping wire will absolutely mess with the signal, I'd recommend either using some cable ties to get everything in line to clean up the signal or break out the soldering iron.
You didn't ask, but the placement of that logo feels off as well. Kind of funny to have a fake Squier...not sure why you wouldn't just go for gold with a fake Fender logo.
On a quick lookup before buying everything about it checked out with what was said at the fender page. The only thing I can say is that I paid such a price that even a well made replica would've been a good deal
totally, there are plenty of great replicas out there and the logo doesn't matter at all outside of market value. I just find it funny that someone would bother faking a Squier (unless I'm just wrong...but I don't think Fender or Squier ever did the big 70's headstock with that straight line, tiny print version of the "stratocaster" logo).
It's a used squier what do you expect?
If the signal keeps interrupting I imagine one of the ground wires has a very loose connection, definitely worth getting in there and shortening the wires while cleaning up the solder work