Wiring diagram sanity check

[Jamie Unden]

Ok, so I'm doing a guitar for my grandson and it has four single-coil pickups. It's a pawn-shop looking thing. I'm wiring them all in series with a slide switch for each shorting it out of the circuit. Can you guys double check me? It's drawn as if you are looking at the BACK of the pickguard.

[Jamie Unden]

Sanity check failed... try this one instead.

[David King]

Jamie,

Your blue wires are too dark to see on my screen.

[Greg Robinson]

Those blue wires are a bit too dark to make out properly, but if I'm interpreting the diagram correctly, it'll work fine.

[Jamie Unden]

Let's try it with red. If you click the picture it gets bigger.

[Jason Rodgers]

No comment on the wiring or colors, but a question about the results of such a wiring plan: is each single coil pair wired to buck hum when switched on together? So, basically, it becomes a two humbucker guitar, but each coil is individually switchable? Are the coils actually spaced on the guitar as the diagram shows (almost equidistant)? If the answer is yes all around, that's pretty cool.

[Jamie Unden]

No, they won't be 'humbucking' because they are all wound the same way with the same magnetic orientation. At least that is assumed because they are cheap Chinese pickups.

Here's the setup:

[Greg Robinson]

If they're cheap Chinese pickups, you can probably pop the ceramic magnets off the back easily, flip them over, and wire them backwards for RWRP. Simple and worth doing. Of course that would only give you humbucking in 3 of the total possible 15 combinations. I'd also suggest using higher value pots, 1MEG would be good, the 250k would load down the all in series position pretty badly.

[David King]

If they have Alnico rod magnets you can easily remagnetize with reversed polarity using little stacks of round Neodymium magnets placed briefly on the top and bottom of each alnico and tapped a few times for good measure.

[Jason Rodgers]

Dude, that's one radical looking axe! 'Cept fer I'd be flipping those switches up and down with each strum!

And yeah, check out how easy/difficult it would be to flip the magnets on the 1st and 3rd (or 2nd and 4th) to give some bucking potential.

[Jamie Unden]

Thanks, guys! This'll be my grand-son's first electric, so I'm not shooting for a 'pro' sound. I asked him to look around on the internet and pick out a guitar and this is what he found. I haven't been able to find any information on the original, so I'm just winging it.

Starting place.jpg (11.08 KiB) Viewed 12362 times

Here's a thread on my web site for the whole build.
http://www.guitarplansunlimited.com/In% ... 0Shop.html