Strat re-wiring and shielding -no ground/ return w

[firstiguana]

I hope someone can help with this. I am in the process of shielding this old Encore Strat, which has pickups with no visible ground/ return wires.

The current setup (which I imagine was the original manufacturers one) has been working fine - despite having no apparent connection from the pickups to any ground... You can see it in the attached pictures - the system worked before I put the shielding on. I have also attached a schematic of the wiring as it is at present

I am shielding the scratchplate and pickup/ control cavities with copper tape, and I am aware that the existing wiring will no longer work - the green ground connection between pots will create a ground loop in conjunction with the shielding.

So -

1) has anyone got any idea about there being no grounding wires from the pickups, and -
2) bearing that in mind, does anyone have any suggestions about re-wiring - ?

All thoughts gratefully received

[ashcatlt]

Looks to me like the wires coming from the pickups are single conductor + shield cables. They change from red to white there by the volume control, where the outer insulation has been stripped back to allow the shield braids to be collected there. If that's not the case then it can't work. I've seen pickups make a little bit of noise when the bottom end is disconnected (I imagine some sort of capacitive coupling to ground) but it would be very quiet and thin and sound obviously broken.

Don't put too much stock in the "ground loop" thing. We've seen instances where folks star-grounded and ended up with noise which could not be fixed without replaced the wire between the pots.

[firstiguana]

Many thanks!

You are correct, and the failing was my eyesight late at night.

It looked to me as thought the white inner portions were also soldered to the volume pot, which I could not understand.

Now it all looks pretty normal

Thanks also for the heads up regarding the ground loop - I shall intially leave it as it is, and see how it goes....

[4real]

Don't worry about the 'ground loop' thing...tests here have shown...besides, you can't always rely on the shileding so a good hardwired ground connection is important.

There's quite a few wirings that could be possible in the reference section here. Other sounds that might be cool would be to access the 'all on' and B+N options which often sound really good. One way might be is to got to a master tone and use the middle 'tone' as a blender for the middle pickup. I'm not sure how the switching in this guitar would take to that, but I did it in a cheap strat at one time as I recall (might have had a three way selector though) and sounded great. As I recall, i used a three way gibson like selector and used the pot to mix in as much of that middle pickup 'straty sound' to any position...I also ahd a phase switch on that pup, and found on that guitar, it had the opposite effect, as a kind of midrange thickening kind of effect. Such things are subject to the pups and guitar of course, your results might be a bit different...others might have other ideas