IronGear SmokeStack II - 1 Volume, 2 tone

[adambod]

Hi, been a bit confused and couldn't really work out if I was looking at the right diagrams for this so I'm just wondering if I can set up the IronGear SmokeStack II in the bridge position with two single coils in the other positions and have it wired so that the volume and neck tone pots are regular and the bridge tone pot is coil tapped.

[newey]

adambod-

Hello and Welcome to G-Nutz2!

I had no idea what an "Irongear Smokestack II" was until I looked it up. From their website, it appears these are coil-tapped (in the true sense of the word) single coils, with the pickup having three wires, one for the "hi output" and the other for the "low", with the third of course as the ground.

And, I'm going to further assume that this is going into a Strat-type guitar with 3 pickups?

The diagrams on their website show how to use a push/pull pot to switch the coil from tapped to untapped settings. If you are just using the one Smokestack II for the bridge, just use that portion of the diagram for the coil-tap switch wiring. The rest is just going to be std. Strat wring, except with one tone on the bridge instead of the middle.

(the tone control on the bridge is a classic Strat mod, let us know if you have any trouble figuring that part out.)

A couple of things to keep in mind, however: If the other single coils are from a different manufacturer, you will need to correlate those wire colors with those of the Smokestack II. Second, to avoid having to go back in to rewire things, you should check the other pickups for phase with the Smokestack II, using the screwdriver pull-off test.