New to Wiring...

[woodman650]

Hey all,
I've had this guitar laying around that I've been working on for a couple of years now and I've decided to finish it. I've got some humbuckers that I'd like to slap in connected to a 3-way switch, 1 volume, and 1 tone. I've been searching for diagrams online but can't fnd one that suits my nees. The pickups have 2 wires each (1 bare wire, and 1 colored wire... eaither red or white. so 2 wires for each pickup). I just don't know what is supposed to go where.

Also, what do the "F" and "R" stand for on the backs up the pickups? thanks for any help you can give. I can post an image later if it would help.. just let me know.

Woody

[Runewalker]

F = Neck pickup pole spacing
R = Bridge Pickup - pole spacing.

Don't thing you will get a great deal of variety with only two leads, and opening the thing up and separating the leads is more hassle than it is worth, IMHO. Check Wolf's site for how to do that.

If you want greater tonal options you have to get the full four wire config, or at least 3 wire for a coil split.

4 wires give you 5 options in a hum:

Series, in phase
Parallel, in phase
North coil
South coil
out of phase.

Heck if you want to go nuts the real wiring pros here can prob tell you how to get parallel out of phase as well, but that is a pretty infrequently used tone I suspect.

Then setting up two hums you get with a system series/parallel and system in/out of phase the tonal palate is nearly endless. One of these days I calculated it out, but it is over 50. Of course you many are similar, but there are a wide variety of distinctly different tones in that array.

so first thing to decide is are you going to stick with the two lead bucker. If so your choices on wiring are simpliler.

[woodman650]

hey rune,
wow. thanks for all of that info! yeah, I think I'm gonna stay with the two wires. the pickups aren't anything special and it's my first project guitar... so my expectations aren't set too high. let me post a photo later of what I'm working with. thanks again

[woodman650]

ok... this is what I've got:



I don't think it's that hard to setup but I just don't have a clue... Also, my toggle switch is missing, hm. Could someone maybe just bring this into paint, draw the lines for the connections I should make?

The wire coming from the pickup with the red inner wire is from the bottom pickup. I also had a pair of volume and tone knobs where that black wire (I assume the grounding wire) was connected... but I didn't know which to use, so I just put this one in one for now. Help would be greatly appreciated, thanks a bunch

[woodman650]

crap ok... let me fix this image link tomorrow morning. haha, sorry about that

[TooManyWires]

Well, F and R usually means front and rear, respectively. Front being equivalent to neck and rear being equivalent to bridge. You might check out the Seymour Duncan website, they have a huge selection of wiring diagrams in their help section or some section on the site. I can draw up a diagram for what you want to do as well if you'd like, however, I haven't figured out how to post images yet, so if you want a diagram, then leave me your e-mail address, and I can do it up and pass it along.

[woodman650]

here we go...
wselick.balder.prohosting.com/1.html

hey TooManyWires, yeah that'd be great. [e-mail] thanks!

[TooManyWires]

I've figured out how to post images. So here's what I've got for this one.





Sorry for it being so big and ugly, but it loses some of it's quality when you save as a jpeg from a bmp.