6 position 2 pole rotary switch with single coils - grounding question

[ryan morris]

I found a diagram that does everything I want, and bought the switch.

I want to wire it up in my Gretsch Jr Jet (removing the 3 way toggle), but I have a couple questions.

1. Where should I land the bridge PU ground? (back of the tone pot?)
2. What is C on the lower wafer?
3. Does this look right? Anything that should change?
4. What basic electronic information resource can I read to figure out this kind of stuff on my own? It feels like something I need to know.

Thanks in advance.

 

[sunbeast]

1. The wiring of this switch as is only requires the 3 pickup connections listed, the bridge pickup ground can remain grounded as it is.
2. C= the center contacts that run between the 3+4 contacts in the center wafer (the center contacts on the bottom wafer are actually in the center of the switch). Each wafer on this switch has 6 selectable contacts that connect to the center associated with them (so when you are in position 6, the "6" contact connects to the corresponding C contact, etc). There are 4 total "center" contacts (upper wafer top+ bottom, lower wafer top + bottom) that each have 6 selectable connections that can be made to their corresponding center contact.
3. Looks right to me, though if your pickups have grounded pickup covers or shielding then you will need to isolate the ground for these from the signal ground on the neck pickup or there are a few settings here that will probably have added noise and other potential issues because they will no longer go direct to ground (ie- the series and out of phase options will put the pickup shielding/cover into the signal path). Post a picture of the bottom of the neck pickup.
4. If you know what these basic coil configurations mean (ie- in this case "series" means the + of the bridge pickup is being run through the - of the neck pickup, phase reverse means the + and - of the neck pickup are being swapped, etc) and how the switch contacts work then it is easy to trace what connections are happening in each switch position to make things work. Starting from scratch to figure out one of these wiring schemes takes a bit of effort to think of all the connections that need to occur, so it helps to reverse engineer things with a working scheme like this to see how it is all done.

FYI- if this is for a bass, I would guess that you will find the two out of phase tones basically worthless IMO. I know I have when playing with these tones. On a guitar they can be useful!

 

[ryan morris]

Sunbeast, thank you.
I wired it up and yes, there is a lot of noise in 4,5,6. The pickups are fully covered in chrome/shielded. Touching the neck pickup squeals. I covered the control panel in shielding tape. How do I isolate the ground?

Also, yes, the out of phase sounds are fun on my Mustang guitar.. and I was kind of hoping for tick-tack sound with a pick out of them, but it's not great, and I'll probably never use those settings.

Maybe I just put the 3 position switch back in.. ha

 

[sunbeast]

Sunbeast, thank you.
I wired it up and yes, there is a lot of noise in 4,5,6. The pickups are fully covered in chrome/shielded. Touching the neck pickup squeals. I covered the control panel in shielding tape. How do I isolate the ground?

Also, yes, the out of phase sounds are fun on my Mustang guitar.. and I was kind of hoping for tick-tack sound with a pick out of them, but it's not great, and I'll probably never use those settings.

Maybe I just put the 3 position switch back in.. ha

It’s hard to say how they grounded the pickup cover without seeing the bottom of the pickup. Ideally there is an obvious point where the cover is soldered to that can be isolated from the signal ground wire, but sometimes with these types of pickups these connections may be done internally and epoxied around so that you don’t have access. You’ll have to pull the pickup out of the cavity and have a look plus post a picture here. If there is no access to the solder point for the covers then the pickups are probably just not a good candidate for series or out of phase wiring

 

[ryan morris]

this is a pic from this post, (I've had my bass apart so much that I just grabbed this image)

 

[sunbeast]

View attachment 5125886
this is a pic from this post, (I've had my bass apart so much that I just grabbed this image)

Does the pickup wire on the control cavity side have two internal wires and a conductive shielding wrap? If so, then it may just require grounding that shielding wrap separately from the other ground wire.

If all you have is two wires or just a single wire and a shielding wrap then you’d have to get into that pickup casing to potentially do anything about it. Desoldering big solder blobs like what is holding the pickup cover together requires a pretty high heat soldering iron to pull apart safely- doing it with typical soldering heats will take a really long time and potentially damage internal components as the whole casing will heat up. You could also use a little saw to cut the solder apart if you do need to get inside there after all.

 

[ryan morris]

sunbeast, thank you! I've decided I'll go in a different direction and bought an Artec/Guyker Mudbucker that I'll route into the neck position. I'm hoping I'll have 4 conductor wires (it seems some people get 2, while others get 4) and will be able to do some weird stuff with this switch.

This pickup is supposed to be about 30k in series, while my single coils are supposed to be about 6k.

Thinking of the following:
1 - Neck Series
2 - Neck Parallel
3 - Neck Series / Bridge
4 - Neck Parallel / Bridge
5 - Bridge
6 - ????

I'm not sure about the 6th position. Would position 3 even make sense/would it overpower the bridge?

Alternatively, I've got the original 3 way toggle switch and a dpdt toggle switch I could play with.

What makes the most sense here?

Edit: I've tried to get through big solder globs like that before, and I don't have the power to do it. So, going in this direction was an option I had considered for a while before anyway.