The Steel Guitar Forum

I was talking to Barry Thomas today about my Carter problem.

I only play on the E9 neck and it will play hot and loud for a while, and then get quieter or totally quiet. Eventually, it goes back to full volume.

Barry suggest that my neck selector switch might be bad. And after playing some more for a few hours, I tend to agree with his diagnosis.

So the question....
There doesn't appear to be any easy access to the switch without removing the neck, thus disassembling most of the guitar. Does anyone have insight on this or have suggestions on how to replace the switch?

2nd question...
How hard would it be to bypass the switch and just have an E9 guitar that happens to have an unplayable C neck? I wouldn't want this to be permanent but at least I could play a gig without fear of my guitar going dead in the middle of a song.


PS I've eliminated amp, cables, pedal as the problem for this issue.

Photos would help those of us not familiar with this particular instrument. Most I have seen mount in either the end plate or between the necks, in both cases the switch can be accessed with the guitar upside down.

This is not my guitar but it's identical. Better picture than I could take.

The neck has to be removed. The screws that secure the neck to the body are mostly under cross shafts requiring them to be removed to get to the screws. I would maybe consider drilling a hole between the necks and mounting a switch from under the guitar. There is no place on the end plate that will work. I wanted to mount a switch for my XR-16 coil tap switch and the end plate was a no-go. I mounted it on a bracket under the guitar. It might be possible to remove the pickup and make some kind of tool to move the new switch into the current hole, but I can't imagine how that would work.

This was a bad design on Carters. When I’ve encountered the same scenario, I’ve mounted the new toggle through the body between the necks near the old switch and removed the defective one rather than removing the neck, which is quite an extensive chore. As for your idea of eliminating the bottom neck electronics, you can easily do that by wiring the top neck pickup directly to the output jack and then you have no need to replace or rewire the new toggle. Definitely the easiest fix of the two. BTW, I never replace a toggle with another 3 way. I always use 2 way toggles. Just personal preference. Never had those wear out and still never found an advantage of having both necks active at the same time. The 3 way switches tend to have more issues over years of use.
Dave

I would 1st try to tighten the output jack and simply re-solder the wires to the output jack as a bad ground and a cold solder joint can also do that. Should you decide to try to wire the pickup directly leave enough wire to be able to reconnect the wires to the switch as a failing pickup can cause the same problem.