The last major step, wiring the guitar. It has been a long time since I soldered any wires. And even then, it was just one or two wires every few years to fix a vacuum cleaner or toaster. So I was a little nervous about messing this up somehow. The Net is rife with stories about folks who have taken a perfectly good guitar, replaced the switch, pots, or pickups, only to end up with an acoustic guitar that has a lot of buzz and hum. I really wanted to avoid joining those ranks.
The biggest challenge for me was simply understanding the wiring diagrams and how they relate to the parts I had sitting in front of me. On the three-way switch or jack, which is the ground? My switch looks different from the diagram! How do I deal with that mesh grounding jacket around the wires? Will I melt through the insulation when soldering the mesh ground to the back of the pots? Do I go with vintage wiring? Or some other flavor? What are the advantages? Will a 20 cent capacitor work as well as a $30 “vintage replacement”? Ultimately I just needed to dive in, search YouTube for a similar video, and hope I got it right.
First up was the three-way switch. Here is a good video of how to go about it. And my result.
Next, I pre-wired the pots and capacitors so I would not have to do as much soldering in the electronics cavity. I really don’t know if this saved any real time or hassle. There was so much to be done after the pots were installed that I think it would almost have been easier to put the pots in first, and then do the soldering. Anyway, this worked out. Note that in the photo below, I wired the capacitors incorrectly. I believe they were moved from the center tab on the volume pots (left) to the lower. I was getting ahead of myself and not double checking my connections.
Next, I installed the switch and pickups and ran the wires to the main electronics cavity. The bundle of three wires is coming from the pots. And the other two larger wires are coming directly from the pickups. There is a small wire coming from tail piece bushing that is used to ground the strings.
No shots of the final wiring. Perhaps I am embarrassed by the ugly solders! Anyway, it all seems to work. I do have a little bit of buzz that seems to be related to grounding. I don’t know if it is coming from the amp, or my wiring. I’ll have to bring the guitar to the local shop and plug into something different. It shows up mainly when the amp is set with a lot of gain. With clean settings, the buzz is just about gone. I’m not playing at high volume right now, so it is not an issue.
