Grateful Dead Music Forum

The Floating Ground Wire Issue
That unsoldered green wire is almost certainly meant to be part of the ground buss — the heavy-gauge copper backbone that ties all grounds (volume pot, tone pots, pickup cavities, output jack sleeve) into a single low-resistance path. In the original Tiger wiring, Steve Parish and Doug Irwin used a thick 10-gauge bare copper wire that runs from the volume pot directly to the output jack sleeve, with secondary connections to the tone pots and shielded cavities.

Here's what likely happened:

1. The green wire was a temporary or intermediate ground during initial wiring or a previous tech's repair
2. It got left unsoldered when the guitar was last worked on
3. It's now floating — not connected at either end — which means it's doing absolutely nothing for your signal path