the Fly Clone Project

Hello, so I just bought a 2001 pre-refined fly deluxe. I had it on 2 gigs and on both of them the guitar on mag pickups just for like 10-30 secs played at half volume or no sound at all. I´m suspecting the mag/comb/piezo switch, because when this happened I switched to combination, turned off acoustic preamp and the volume was normal, when switched to mag, the volume halfed again. I also took it to my class and played the guitar for 2 days, 6 hours each and the problem didn´t happen. Today in my class the guitar did it again, I quickly switched to mono to see if the volume was still halfed and it was. So maybe jack? The amp should be ok, I was using it before parker with no issues and even after I played a gig with different guitar with no problem at all. When I first opened the guitar there was a lot of uncleaned flux, i suppose this is not a normal condition from factory, so someone was probably repairing it at some point. The flux was old and hard to clean, some is still left. I used ipa and cotton swab. Can someone help me how to troubleshoot this? Or should I just go straight to luthier? I´m afraid I won´t be able to find anyone with experience with flys. I´m in central europe - czech republic. Thank you very much for any help.

Hi @roarmackh—sorry to hear about this issue. We’ve all been in your position before trying to determine where the failure point is and that’s not a good feeling!

Here’s a recent thread where we found success together. Might be good to start there checking some of the suggestions to rule out the easier ones: the 9 volt connector, the blue knob on the preamp, etc.

The switches can break on a pre-refined Fly and the jack as well—sometimes, a little deoxit spray (or similar) can work wonders, but if you’re having the mag signal cut in half, then my guess it’s a component that’s not fully making contact.

Keep us posted—others will chime in soon, I’m sure—and we’ll figure this out

Thank you, I will look into the topic and try everything. I also think its some bad contact somewhere, the transition between volumes is not always smooth and the sound of it evokes a bad contact in me