bad pickup? on old strat copy

My old (20+ years) strat copy has a neck pup that is not working. All wiring looks good. Solder joints tight, no shorted wires. When I put switch in neck position, it will buzz when I turn the tone to the treble end. the low end takes buzz out, but no sound other than that. All else works. Tone pot reads 0 - 465K when I turn it from 0 to 10. Is there a way to check it or just assume it's dead? I can buy a "loaded pickguard" on evil bay for pretty cheap out of a real fender or a squier, so I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.

The wires are hair-like anyway, tiny gauge wire. And it is 20+years old. I just hate when things aren't working like they are supposed to. The guitar sat cased up for probably 10 years.

On the positive side, I did set it up using Fender's owner's manual from the website and got it playing the best it ever has.

Are there any things I can easily check?

Thanks
Randy

Rando,

Here's a link to a page on troubleshooting a stratocaster guitar with a multimeter, Strat Troubleshooting. You might want to look up similar pages and that might help you out. From your post, I figure you checked the resistance of the tone potentiometer with respect to ground and that the 0 - 465 kohm reading is the correct "spec" value for that pot/guitar/pickup configuration. Now it could still be the pickup, but the "buzzing" sound to me seems like it's due to either a bad potentiometer or possibly the pickup selector switch. I'd reason that it's not the guitar jack since your other pickup seems to work, but a bad switch could be bleeding off some of the treble pickup circuit into the neck pickup. I'd try a continuity(?) check on the switch, and also try turning the volume pot for the bridge pickup to zero if your guitar has independent volume pots for each pickup, and see if the "buzz" condition persists while playing with the neck pickup on. If it doesn't, then I'd bet the switch is the problem.

Again, just my thoughts. Maybe they'll be of some help to ye. Good luck.

Capt. Jones

Thanks Cap'n.

Randy