Wiring
We wanted to keep the wiring harness on this guitar fairly standard, with the exception of a mini toggle switch for switching from Humbucker to Single Coil. This is easy to do with 4-wire Humbuckers like the ones we had (from Seymour Duncan). All that extra switch does is short the connector wire between the two coils to ground when you want Single Coil mode. We used a DPST switch - one pole for each pickup. After drilling the body, including the new hole for the switch, we made a template out of a piece of scrap material that was about the same thickness as the body, being careful to locate the holes in the same location, relative to each other, as on the body. We then mounted the controls, switches, and output jack on the template. This allowed us to wire the controls with a minimum of slack, insuring that it would all go together well.
Control Template - front
Control Template - back
While looking for a good schematic to use as a reference, we stumbled across someone who was selling an original wiring harness from a '60s Gibson Dot, with a nice picture of it. It was pretty much all done with un-insulated shielded wire. It looked like the original pickup wires were the same kind of shielded wire, and they had been cut off of the harness. This inspired us to try to duplicate at least the general layout of the harness - plus, we had some nice un-insulated shielded wire we were able to use.
Wiring harness from '60s Gibson Dot (from eBay auction)
We followed the picture as closely as possible, except for the pickup wires, which, on ours, were four conductor, plus shield. These would get attached later just before the harness gets installed into the body.
Beginning of the harness wiring
The center poles of the mini switch are wired to ground via one of the pots. The center leads of the pickups are soldered to the two terminals at the top of the switch. The output of the selector switch (upper left) was wired to the output jack. We only added some shrink tubing to a section of the shielded wire where it could potentially short with one of the tone caps.
Completed harness ready for pickup wires
Wiring harness with pickup and bridge ground wires attached
OK! Ready to put it all together...
Below, we see the harness ready to be snaked back through the F holes. We used thin wire that we ran down through the various holes, back up through the F hole, and attached to the control shafts. We then eased the harness through the F hole, and pulled the controls up through their holes using the wires. A small mirror on the end of a shaft is handy to check your progress, and to insure that all of the wires are where they ought to be, and not tangled.
Wiring harness ready to be snaked back into place
Once the harness is in place, the last step was to install the knobs.
Back together
Below, we can also see the new Seymour Duncan humbucker pickups that we installed along with the new harness.
Back together