Right, so here's part 2 of the build.
I finished up all the wiring of strat v2.0 last night.
The rats nest I created last year. (v1.0):
In the old setup, P/P-T1 switched the bridge pu from series to parallel. P/P-Vol switched the neck pu from series to parallel. And P/P-T2 altered the 5-way's switching scheme.
B, B-M, M, M-N, N or B-N, B+M, B-M-N, M+N, B+N. (- series, +parallel).
Again the old setup:
A JB jr. in the bridge pos. A hot-stack in the middle. Hardwired in series, not switcheable. And Hotrails in the neck position.
I replaced the switch for the triple-decker, and replaced the pu's from the mid and neck positions for more of that JB jr goodness.
And I unsoldered all the wiring from the push-pull pots. Except for the orange drops. Those can stay.
Here I wired up the pu's and the ground wire, grounding everything that needed to be.
No, this isn't even half way done yet.
I found a new favorite way to wire stuff up. I used the bare wire from a bit of 4-lead pu cable I had lying around. Solder it to the starting point, add a bit of insulation, run it through the next lug and solder it in place, add more insultation, run it through the next lug, solder it in place, repeat. No cutting required. No stripping insulation from the wires. Of course I didn't have nearly enough bare wire, so I only did the ground lead and a little bit of the other wiring this way.
It's good for wiring the push-pulls and the pots, wiring them up goes real quick that way.
The switch not so much, the insulation is way too bulky for around there.
Done ! (well, nearly, after taking the picture I did a final check and found I had forgotten a wire. That's what checks are for.)
I tied the wires together into bunches to make it look neater. And as you can see, the 3-ply switch is pretty much obscured from sight, covered in wires.
It was a b
h to wire it up. Everything's so tiny, plus there were always wires in the way of where the soldering iron needed to go.
Most of the wiring isn't even visible on the picture. Whenever I could I had the wires go down in between the wafers, so the wires wouldn't obscure so much of the switch.
For future reference, I think it would be better to take the switch apart for wiring it up. Soldering everything to it then would be much easier. But you would need longer wires, creating even more of a nest.
Yep, one whole side of the switch goes unused. I used 10 of the 12 poles.
(no, I don't want to think about what extra functions I could cram into the 1 and 5 positions using those 2 remaining poles and the 2 P/P's that go unused in those positions. I just finished, I'm not going to restart. Maybe next year I'll do v3.0 ... and make rewiring the strat an annual thing.)
All put back together, looking quite ordinary except for the black pearl. New strings, still plugged in after playing non-stop for 3 hours while I should have made myself some dinner instead.
I like it! But I'm hungry now ...
(it's a 1986 Squier by Fender. Made by Fujigen Japan. The same company that made the Gibson Orville line, the Epiphone Elitis line and makes the high end Ibanez guitars.
It used to be one of the early guitars of a friend of mine. In the mid nineties he bought a Fender USA standard strat, but his old squier was just better, so he got rid of the Fender again (musicman silhouette special next, he still has that one). My first guitar was a used '04 Fender USA standard strat. I later got this humble little squier and it was pretty clear the Fender had become obsolete, exit Fender strat.
I also got an Epiphone custom shop Les Paul which is on par with that same friends' '02 Gibson USA Les Paul standard.
The custom shop Epi is good, but again, humble old Squier > Custom shop Epi. )