Wow. I'm exhausted and the day is just beginning. I got up early and fixed my guitar.

Swapping the potentiometer and securing the loose ground took over two and a half hours.

First off, it turns out that the ground was never connected to the bridge. (It's got that famous Chinese craftsmanship!) The wire was apparently supposed to run to the plate that attaches to the springs for the whammy bar in the back of the guitar (which then connects to the bridge), but so far as I can tell it was never attached. The ends of the wire weren't tinned and the hole that the wire was supposed to run through was partly filled with glue so I had to drill it out. I removed the bridge on the front of the guitar (9 screws and 3 were really hard to get to) which was necessary before I could remove the springs and get to the plate on the back of the guitar (6 screws on the cover on the back of the guitar and 2 screws inside). Then it was a royal pain to get the solder to stick properly to the plate. There was clearly a spot where it was supposed to go. I sanded and fluxed the spot, but although I tried with 3 different kinds of solder none of it would stick until on a whim I heated the plate from the back with a fine flame from my BernzOmatic micro-torch at which point the solder stuck with minimal effort. I'm guessing that when I touched the tip of my soldering iron to the front of the plate the direct heat oxidized the aluminum, thus weakening the joint.

While I was about it, I lengthened the ground and the wires going to the audio jack so that I had a little more room to maneuver when I attached the new potentiometer.

The next thing that sapped my time was tinning and soldering all of those wires going to the potentiometer... 6 grounds on one single terminal! That's 6 thick wires that had to be connected at one tiny little spot. The original potentiometer had a prong that was bent and folded across the top so that the metal cap acted as a conductor. Then the ground wires were all soldered individually to the metal cap. After the hard time I had getting the solder onto the aluminum plate I was in no mood to try and solder anything to the cap so I tinned the ends of each wire and made two bundles of three wires each, then soldered one bundle to the top of the terminal and one bundle to the bottom.

Securing the rest of the wires was a piece of cake in comparison.

I tested everything for continuity before putting the pickguard back on, but just to be sure that it all worked I connected the guitar to my amp and pushed current through the pickups with a weak magnet before restringing it. Amazingly, I got sound out with working volume and tone controls. I did it right on the first try!

I didn't take pictures (sorry), but imagine filling up a 6 foot long table with various parts, tools, trays of screws, bits of wire-shielding and tiny dots of spattered solder. Imagine repeatedly flipping a heavy 40-inch long object, having to keep track of dozens of screws and coping with a tangle of short wires connecting various components to one another in just such a way that the slightest wrong move would yank most of the wires loose.  (I numbered the wires with a Sharpie and tied related wires together just in case that happened.) I had a towel under the guitar to keep it from getting scratched and a rag over the guitar to keep solder-spatter from marring the finish. It was a mess. And honestly, my soldering is ugly.

But it got done.

Finally, I restrung my instrument.

This was my first guitar and when I got it I didn't know how it was supposed to sound. I assumed that since it was a cheap guitar it would never sound especially good without replacing most of the parts, starting with the pickups. I was wrong. The sound is so much cleaner now than it was before that it's like playing a whole different instrument. It is a surreal pleasure to play. I'm looking forward to many more years with it.

...And I never want to do anything like this again!