Strat Step 04

Hello guitar-pickers,

Time for a bit wiring action . . .

Here's the pickguard with the stuff installed but not yet wired. It's a custom leftie from Warmouth. I added two extra holes between the pickups for extra pickup support. Just one volume and one tone control, it's all I need. I'm looking for a Gibson sound - but without having to reach down there to mess with all those 4 knobs and then up there to flip the switch. Too much for my tired old brain ;-)

Two 500K pots (well 470K actually) and a simple 3-way switch. The pots are positioned thus so that I can solder the highs together after a bit of bending (saves a link and is perhaps more reliable). I'll also bend the lows back and solder them to the pot body. This gives a little extra shielding to the pot wiper inside.

You gotta have a plan. Seriously, it goes a lot better if you do a schematic AND a wire routing diagram. Then you can do stuff like hi-lite each connection as it is soldered, etc plus you can scan and save it as a record.

Pickguard wiring completed and checked out OK. With the pots turned up, read about 8K on the vol pot wiper to pot body when the switch is in the bridge position, just under 4K in the middle and about 7K in the neck position. Setting the multimeter to mV and pulling a magnet away from each pickup gave a momentary positive voltage for each one, so they're in phase. Doing that now is so much better than discovering they are out of phase after plugging the guitar into an amp! As you can see, the coil tap wires (brown&white) still need to be insulated.

Later, I'll be connecting the ground wire from the bridge and the shielded cable from the output jack, leaving about 10" length for ease of fitting or removing the pickguard assembly.

Best Regards,

Ted