help me with my hot rail wiring please

[jorma420]

i would like to install hot rails in my strat with 1 main volume one main tone and 3 mini toggle switches for each pickup on off on(single coil of humbucking) eliminating the blade switch just not 100% sure how the wiring would go. thank you in advance

[newey]

jorma420-

Think of this in a modular fashion. Each pickup gets its own switch, and they are all the same (well, maybe not if you want some hum-cancellation, but more on that later). The Vol and Tone controls will be wired as with any V + T, 2 knob setup, you can consult any of hundreds of diagrams across the webiverse. This diagram is just the module for the switching, the output wire goes to the Vol + lug.

You said "Hot Rails" which I took to mean Seymour Duncan, although the term "hot rails" has become sort of generic. But I used SD wire colors, if your pickups are different, you may have to transpose things a bit. Also, you will need DPDT On-On-On switches, three of them.



Now, for that word about Humbucking. You can wire the switches all three alike, as shown, but then none of your single-coil combinations will be hum-cancelling. There's no way (without more switching and more complexity) to get all possible combos to be humcancelling, but you can get two out of the three. To do so, one of the three switches will be wired differently, so as to select the opposite (South) coil. We've termed it (from member wolf) as wiring the HB "inside out", also called "restacking the coils". To do so, the black and white wires swap positions with each other, and the green and red wires swap with each other. Now, the S coil is active when set to the split coil setting.

Wire the middle pickup "inside out" and the M+N and M+B combos will be hum-cancelling when split, like positions 2 and 4 on a regular Strat; wire the neck "inside out" and the N+B and N+M combos become hum-cancelling; this gives you the N and B Tele-ish sound as hum-cancelling. Wire the bridge that way and the N+B and B+M are hum-cancelling. The choice is yours, depending on what combos you're more likely to use in single-coil mode.

Oh, and:

Hello And Welcome To G-Nutz2!