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Confusing, but sounds like something's not grounded when it should be.
My understanding is that all guitars have a wire that goes from bridge into the cavity and ends up attached to ground with the rest, so I imagine that's what this extra one is. Its job is to ground the rest of the metal hardware (bridge, strings, tuners).
If it's not too much hassle, undo what you just did to the bridge pickup, but swap the wires of the neck. This might lose any humbucking you were getting in the middle position, but it should put them back in phase.
I think...
mattioats-
@mattioats, It was that I hadn't spotted that the earth wire didn't go straight from the PU to ground, It was soldered to a convenient little bracket in the gap between the pu and control cavity with another wire going from that to ground on the back of the vol pot.
I'd swapped the hot and ground on the controls which meant that I had hot AND ground connected to this little halfway point. It should have just shorted the signal but I guess one of the connections wasn't great anyway so it was buzzing madly. I just snipped everything off the little bracket, joined the two halves of the hot and earth wires so they didn't stop at the little bracket thing. That got rid of the mad buzz when using the bridge. I then ran and ran a new earth straight from the bridge to earth (again, bypassed the halfway bracket thing and ran straight to vol put) and hey presto, no hum.
Kind of pleased that I figured it out by trial and error and logic rather than blindly following a diagram. Was my first day "off" in ages and I had a very pleasant day tinkering about, drinking tea and generally pottering. To have a fully working and great sounding "new" guitar at the end of it is a massive bonus!
Dooks-Fatberg
Sorry this is turning into a bit of a saga.
Basically, you can’t just reverse the wires on a standard tele bridge pu because they have a copper bass plate and there’s an link wire between the bass plate and ground so you need to add a new earth wire. Or something. Was all prepped to do that but when I removed the bridge (which involved cutting off the strings i’d only put on last night) it turns out my bridge pu doesn’t have a bass plate. In theory this means that I could just flip the wires. Did this and all worked as it should but I got a mad buzzing when touching the bridge plate which should in theory be totally isolated from the pu.?
Noticed there was an extra earth just held under the bridge plate (not soldered) and pulling this removed the buzz. I am getting a slight buzz that goes when I touch the bridge but nothing like what happens when the extra ground is attached. Tried every possible home for this extra earth and every place it was placed it either buzzed like fuck or shorted the signal altogether. Taped it off and screwed it all back together and popped out for some new strings.
Any ideas?