Wiring
The pickups and switches are mounted on the pickguard, and are wired up. Here are some pictures of the various parts located on the pickguard.
The finished pickguard ready to be mounted.
Top view of the assembled pickguard.
Having all of the electronics attached to the pickguard makes the whole package easy to manage. It would be fairly easy to have several pickguards all made up with different pickup configurations, and swap them out periodically. You only need to connect two wires to the output jack, and a ground wire to the bridge assembly to install the pickguard on the guitar.
Bottom side of pickguard with components in place.
Close up of the switches and pots.
We were a little nervous that with all of the wire and switches jammed in here that we would have hum problems, but so far, it seems pretty quiet. We still want to go back and line the cavity with foil.
A ground wire from the pickguard electronics runs to the whammy bar unit to ground the bridge.
Detail of the layout and logic of the switches.
The picture above shows the layout of the selector and mode switches. The Humbucker Mode switch allows us to select Single Coil, Double Coil Parallel, or Double Coil Series (normal Humbucker) modes. The switch affects both Humbucker pickups. The Center Pickup switch allows us to turn the center pickup off, On - Normal, or On - Out of Phase. This 3 position center p/u switch is a little hard to operate quickly and accurately - it is hard to select the center off position. Since one of the on positions produces a very thin sounding tone, which we don't think we would use much, we may change this to be a simple On / Off switch.
So far, we are happy with the combinations available to us with this setup. With the Mode switch in a given position, it is easy to use the Humbucker Selector switch in the normal manor to select the pickup combination we want, and the middle single coil can be easily added if desired. We have now used this for a number of gigs, and are very happy with it so far.