Another Teisco guitar project - "Audition" with gold foils

[rosewoodash]

Hello forum, 

Still very new here and blown away by the help I have received.  I have one more project I could use some help on if I am not taking up too much time.

This guitar is an "Audition" branded Teisco with two gold foil pickups. It has an on/off switch for each pickup, 2 500k volume controls, and a 500k tone control.

So the guitar as I bought it had and continues to have some problems I have been remedying. First was the nut, which was cut completely wrong and replaced. The second was the neck angle which was quickly fixed with a full contact neck shim from Stew-Mac.  

Now on to the electronics...

These pickups have the ability to sound incredible, and this guitar plays really well now, with a wide and thick neck, which as you know is incredible rare in modern production guitars. But the problem with the pickups is that they are not height adjustable, with the bridge pickup being so far from the strings it is barely audible. The bridge pickup is also offset to the side so that the uncovered pole pieces don't line up, further contributing to the lack of sound.

So I am fixing these two problems by shimming the pickups up a bit using some maple veneer, and cutting the pick-guard a little it to move the pickup to the side where it is usable.  

As far as the electronics go, it seems like I am in the same boat as the last guitar, with the shielded wire connecting to the body of the pickup, so there is no way to add series/parralel switching to this guitar?  Would this also be true of not being able to add some phase shifting?

Thanks for any help or suggestions!!

Attachments:

[reTrEaD]

Yes, you're boxed into the same corner. The way the pickups are cabled prevents you from out-of-phase connections as well as the series connection.

[rosewoodash]

Got it, thank you. You mentioned in my other post that "your guitar with the foil pickups has its volume controls wired backward".  So it seems like the way these are wired is another contributor to the low volume of the guitar, and maybe I should rewire these controls to make them more efficient? Does that involve rewiring the switch?  

[reTrEaD]

Forward or backward makes no difference in output when the volume control is fully clockwise (maximum). It just changes how the control functions when at partial volume or when fully counter-clockwise.

In this case, better function of the volume controls was sacrificed to prevent one volume control at full counter-clockwise killing all sound when both pickups are selected.

[newey]

Yes, you're boxed into the same corner. The way the pickups are cabled prevents you from out-of-phase connections as well as the series connection.

Modification of the pickups to separate the ground from the shield may be possible, if you can access the coil wires. However, it can be tricky to do, and I wouldn't experiment with this set of pickups as it can result in a terminal maiming of the pups.

I'd haunt EBay to see if a set of these pickups are available, buy them, and use that set for experimentation, saving the originals just in case it all goes badly.

[rpolly]

Hey guys, I may need your help on this topic. I found this  guitar at a thrift shop in pretty rough shape and I am going to try to repair it. I it is missing the bottom 2 knobs and the input jack. I can see how to wire most of it from the pictures but it gets a little blurry with how to wire the input jack and bottom pot. Does anyone know what is going on or have a wiring diagram they can send? 

[newey]

I haven't found a diagram for one of these with 3 pots. There is a similar guitar with a single V and T. And we can't tell much from the picture posted previously by rosewoodash, it doesn't look like all three are even wired in the picture.

My best guess would be that it's wired like a 3-knob Flying V or Explorer= a separate volume for each pickup wired before the switches, and a master tone off of the switch output. Like this:



But that's just a guess, it could be individual tone controls and a master volume for that matter.