<> perfect solution for Strat volume knob
I use fuzz with my Strat, and I'm constantly riding the vol knob. I wear out a vol pot about once a year, even with the high-quality CTS and DiMarzio custom taper pots. Not sure how I'm so hard on them just by turning them, but oh well.
Although I understand the logic of grounding everything to the vol pot case, in reality it's a PITA. I have a production-quality soldering iron and I've been soldering my own guitar wiring since I was a teenager, but that's not the whole picture - although a skilled person with the right iron and tip can get in and out before damaging the internal wiper or track, it's still no fun trying to get all 3 pickup grounds, the tone ground, the trem claw ground, and the output jack ground to sit exactly where they need to on the pot case while holding the iron in one hand and the solder in another.
I've tried using my own screw terminal blocks to star ground everything - it works, but then you run into space issues trying to get everything to sit where it needs to while fitting the pickguard back into the routing pockets. The typical routing of a Strat body makes the vol pot the ideal place to ground everything.
So the Toneshaper core pot is the perfect solution. The only small problem I ran into is that the ground terminal hole is not really large enough to fit all 3 pickup ground wires in - you could probably fit the wires themselves in (plus all the other ground wires), but if it's pushback cloth style, the thick cloth gets in the way of bundling all the pickup wires together near the terminal. You could trim/push back the cloth a lot to get it out of the way, but that's a pain. I just combined all 3 pickup grounds to a single ground wire with a small twist wire connector - even with that, the ground terminal barely fit the pickup ground wire, tone pot ground, trem claw ground, and jack ground - but it did fit, so problem solved.
It's a CTS pot - works great, taper seems good.
I've been doing the annual vol pot replacement on my Strat for 10 years and I dread it more every year - so much so that this year I just kept using a scratchy/glitchy pot for 6 months. I'm ordering a boatload of these today - it reduces a job that normally takes 90-120 mins to <60 mins and zero frustrations. Not to mention that every time you unsolder the wires from the old pot, the tips are usually cruddy and you have to cut/strip back a little more wire to get a clean tip - eventually your wires get too short and you have to rewire the whole harness.
I'm sure their comprehensive PCB's are great too, but the rest of my components and wiring are in great shape, so it's nice to have this one pot as a perfect drop-in solution.
