RS4 and earthing issue

[Podicle2]

Hi all,
I have a pair of RS4s, a cherry with Lollar Imperials and a gold top with Lollar P90s. Both are stupendously good guitars. I bought the goldtop used when it was a year or so old back in 2009ish and the cherry I bough new old stock here in Australia about 5 years ago. I think it is similar vintage to the goldtop (i.e when Lollars were still used).

I noticed since I bought it that the cherry guitar was very noisy for a humbucker-loaded guitar, and kept meaning to check the earth wire. I confirmed with a multimeter some time ago that the bridge/tailpiece was not earthed, even though the earthing wire was present disappearing into its hole in the control cavity. So today I removed the tailpiece stud and saw about 3-4mm of wire broken off in the bottom of the hole. The wire had been sheared off level with the bushing hole. I pulled the wire out, trimmed it, replaced everything and now have an earthed guitar. It has obviously been like this since manufacture because the stud has never been removed and I have never messed with the wiring.

Anyway, I then thought about my other guitar, which I have owned for over a decade. It has always been noisy, which I always put down to it having P90s. I checked it with the multimeter and sure enough the tailpiece was not earthed on it either! I repeated the procedure, saw that it also had the sheared of 3-4mm of wire in the bottom of the hole and now it is now earthed as well. This guitar has never had any work done to it, and I can only presume that this has also been present since manufacture.

Now, when I removed the tailpiece bushings from both guitars they were the tightest I have ever encountered, and took some effort to remove. I hypothesise that when these bushings were originally pressed in they guillotined off the earthing wires, leaving the bridges unearthed. I also suggest that it would be incredible if my two were the only two affected as such.

So I suggest that everyone with an RS4 check the tailpiece earthing by either a) dialling up some gain and touching the strings. The buzz should reduce when the strings are touched. Or b) use a multimeter to check continuity between the tail/bridge/strings and the edge of the input jack.