Two...two....two Tele's in one!

[piebaldpython***]

So........uh....lol........how soon before you begin accepting our gits to do mods on them? I mean, you already are noted for your pedal mods/building....so it seems to me ( ) that modding gits is your next logical step. Just kidding......sort of.

By the way Fretters, I bought DVM's Xaviere-820. He had already upgraded the pups to Alnico IIIs, changed the pots to 250s, and put in a push/pull to get the pups in series as well as the standard parallel. A sweet sounding Tele for sure with a great variety of sounds. She's a heavy sucker but for a wide-shouldered LOAD like me, it's no problemo.

[duhvoodooman***]

Here's the scheme I will be using to wire up this mod for my CV '50s Tele. The new neck humbucker with be connected through a 4-wire "quick-connect", working as shown in the photo posted above. The four pickup wiring connections will be:

• humbucker "hot" signal (to 4-way switch)
• humbucker ground (to 4-way switch)
• humbucker shield (to ground/back of vol pot)
• humbucker soldered pair (to push-pull switch on tone pot)

Wiring diagram:

You may notice that the push-pull switch connects the soldered wire pair of the humbucker (i.e. where the two coils are connected in series) to the "hot" signal coming out of the 4-way switch into the volume pot. When the push-pull is engaged, this will cause one of the coils of the humbucker to be shorted back on itself, muting it, while the other coil continues to pass signal.

Originally, I planned to connect the soldered pair to ground through the push-pull. But because of the bridge-neck-in-series wiring through the 4-way switch, this has the unintended effect of turning on the neck pickup whenever the switch is pulled up, irrespective of where the 4-way is set. It also kills the bridge-neck-in-series setting when active, since the bridge signal gets shunted to ground along with the one humbucker coil, so it ends up as a redundant neck coil-cut setting.

I'm also going to switch the tone pot input connection from the volume pot input lug to the output (middle lug), a.k.a. "Gibson '50s style" tone pot wiring. This method markedly reduces treble loss when the volume control is rolled off. Good explanation of how that works HERE.

The new pickguard, mini-bucker and push-pull pot are being delivered today, so I may dive into this tonight....