in the control cavity of my guitar, the 'ground' wires are soldered to pot casings and that's it. are they supposed to be sent from the pot casings to the body of the guitar or something? or are they fine as is...

The ground connections should end up on the ground lug of your guitar's output jack.

Yep. Generally that ground lug on the output jack is wired to the far right lug on the last pot in the circuit, which is generally bent backwards and soldered to the pot casing.

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does connecting the grounds from one 500k pot to another 500k (then on to the jack), effect the overall resistance and sound? it seems to sound a bit different now that i've got all the grounds together. sounds noisier too. aghh

Um I'm not sure. All the pots need to be grounded, so I guess yes you need to wire one casing to the other. If it's noisy now you haven't grounded everything or you have a ground loop(meaning there are two possible paths to the ground in your circuit). I suggest going to guitarelectronics.com and looking at the wiring diagrams they have there and use the one that closest resembles your guitar's wiring and follow it closely.

Does the noise get even worse when you touch the strings? If so, you have soldered the ground and hot output to the opposite prongs on the output jack, happened to me.

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i'm working from a diagram on there, but they don't have H-H / 3 way toggle / 2 vol / 0 tone. so i'm going from a 2 vol / 1 tone, and omitting the tone.

it's close to working now, i think there is just one bad joint somewhere. got rid of the noise on the bridge, now it's just in the neck pickup.

what's strange to me is that it sounded different and better before the grounding ... so that's why i was asking about the pots and stuff. trying to figure out why it would sound different. maybe i'm just crazy

I'm looking at that diagram right now and it's very simple to remove the tone pot from the path. Notice the tone pot is placed right after the switch, before going straight to the output jack. So all you have to do is wire the center prong of the switch directly to the tip prong("hot" lead) of the output jack, skipping that pot. The volume pots go before the switch. Just follow the rest of the diagram exactly how it shows it and you are set.

For the neck pickup's noise, check for this:

-Neck volume pot has the far right prong soldered to the pot casing.
-Bare wire(ground) from the pickup and south start are soldered to the neck volume pot too(check what color yours is by manufacturer here: http://www.guitarelectronics.com/ca...ckupcolorcodes/ )
-You probably already have it done but make sure the switch is grounded.
-Where does the ground from the jack go first? If it's the bridge volume pot casing(or far right prong), make sure you solder a wire between the pot casings so the neck pot is also grounded.
-If none of that works, where is the ground from the bridge/tremolo connected? If it's the bridge volume pot, try grounding it through the grounding on the switch instead.

Hope that helps.

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forgot to ground the switch

btw is the grounding lug soldered to the pot in order to make the whole casing a ground (increase surface area to work on), or is there another reason?

thx for the help.

Hmm no I don't know exactly why, I've just seen it done on every single guitar wiring diagram so I guess it just has to be done. I guess it's because if you don't there wouldn't be a part inside the pot wired to negative(ground), just the hot lead which is +, which is sent in through the left prong and out through the center prong.

No problem m8.

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