input jack mystery

[Scott Spanbauer]

Has anybody seen this on an input Jack before? Tempted to remove, but it must have a purpose.

[Richard Sinkler]

????

[Scott Spanbauer]

Sorry, here's the pic:

[Tucker Jackson]

Wait... what?

One end looks to be soldered to the negative terminal, so somebody was maybe trying to ground something.

Theory: that wire is currently in a "decommissioned" state, and they just wrapped it around the positive blade to get it out of the way.

But at one point, the end was soldered to the changer or a knee lever bracket to try to solve a static buzzing issue. Once they realized the buzz wasn't actually coming from the guitar, instead of just entirely removing the wire -- one end was removed and the wire was wrapped that way so they could reuse it, if necessary.

Either that, or that warp is trying to cut interference or quiet a buzzing single-coil pickup or something. Isn't that why pairs of wires in certain cable are twisted around each other, to minimize interference? Would that work here? I doubt it, or we would see it more often.

[Scott Spanbauer]

I like your theory, Tucker. This is on a Fender 400 that used to have levers on it, judging by the holes left behind. I’ll bet someone thought this wire might come in handy again some day when they took the levers off. Thanks for pondering it.

[Dennis Detweiler]

Remove it.

[Fred]

It looks like it's soldered to the ground and wrapped around the output. That makes a very low value capacitor from hot to ground. It's probably meant to tame the high end or possibly filter out RF noise.

[Tommy Mc]

It kind of makes sense in an overkill sort of way...the hot wire is shielded in the cable by surrounding it with the braided ground. Inside the jack, the wire is no longer shielded. Maybe by wrapping the prong with the ground, somebody hoped to shield the jack? Seems like a lot of work considering that the wires soldered to it aren't shielded....

[Stuart Tindall]

Crude shielding of positive terminal probably.