[jeepnstein]

So I get out the Telecaster last night for a wee bit of Christmas fun and lo and behold I've got no output from the neck pickup. Or I should say a very low output. What are the odds of a bad switch? Or am I looking at a bum pickup? It was OK before I had the setup checked. Since it was late last night I didn't bother to pull the control plate and look for bad connections.

[thesteve]

My guess would be a bad connection somewhere.

[Major Tom]

The contacts on switches often get oxidized and don't make good connection; usually flipping it back and forth several times will at least get the full output to occur intermittently. I have never had a switch like that go bad per se, but plenty of times the contacts needed to be cleaned. If someone had the control plate off, I would suspect that maybe one of the wires might have gotten bent over or yanked in that process, and broke off (or mostly off) and ceased to make good connection. It could be either the ground or the "hot" lead from the pickup.

[jeepnstein]

You were on the money. The pickup is a twin blade that is wired as a humbucker. That means the extra leads are just soldered together to form a loop. For some reason my luthier buddy decided top play with that and didn't get back together properly. It was shorting out against the body of the switch.

It sounds great again, and the RP155 is one of the coolest bits of gear I've played with in a while. I managed to kill two hours alternating between being Joe Strummer and the Allman Brothers.