Paging Wolfe, help installing your pickups

[Nathans_Dad]

I've gotten my guts up and plan to try and switch out the stock pickups on my Tradition Les Paul style guitar this week. I looked in the back of the guitar and the stock pickup have a shielded wire which is soldered to the back of the tone pot and a single black wire soldered to the post on the pot. I have some of Wolfe's Dr Vintage humbuckers to go in. They have 4 wires, one black, one red (these appear to be used before cause the have been tinned), one green and one white which are both covered. Then there is a bare ground.

Where does everything go?

[ramonesfreak]

i will let wolfe answer to his wiring diagram/color code but in general heres what i can tell you having installed a humbucker in a gibson sg a few days ago

the shielded gibson wire is ground...and soldered to the pot. unsolder this with a 40 watt iron and use some desoldering ribbon or a solder sucker to remove the old solder. clean the pot with some light sand paper and flux.

the wire soldered to the lug on the pot is a hot wire. desolder this quickly using an aligator clip clipped to the lead of the cap that comes off that lug to act as a heat sink so you dont fry the cap. clean the lug with some sand paper and make sure no old solder plugs up the hole on that lug

2 of your new PU's wires are likely the coil split wires and need to be twisted together and soldered and then covered with shrink tube or electric tape, (if your not wiring up a a coil split toggle or pot) then the negative gets soldered to the pot and the hot gets soldered to the lug on the pot just like the original wires were

you just need to know which are the coil splits and which are the ground and hot wires...maybe his website has a diagram/color code

[ramonesfreak]

and dont spend too much time with your iron on the pot, it will fry it inside. in and out quickly is what you want both in removing and soldering back on

[ramonesfreak]

what do you mean by "bare ground"...the copper looking thick gauge wire? thats grounded to your tail piece and needs to stay grounded to one of the pots if thats what your talking about. leave it alone

[Nathans_Dad]

Ok thanks for the advice, I'll be sure to be careful.

I checked the website and didn't see a diagram.

Also, if these are coil tapped, is it worth it to buy a coil tap type pot and enable the coil tap??

[Nathans_Dad]

Originally Posted by ramonesfreak

what do you mean by "bare ground"...the copper looking thick gauge wire? thats grounded to your tail piece and needs to stay grounded to one of the pots if thats what your talking about. leave it alone

No, here's a pic of the wires. There is a red and black one, then a white and green which are shrink tubed together and then a bare silver wire which I am assuming is a ground.

These were gently used pickups that Wolfe really cut me a deal on so they have been installed before.

[ramonesfreak]

i think a coil tap is worth it. i didnt do mine yet...just connected them and tucked em away for now but i will some day

with a les paul you have far less options than my SG standard because you dont have the pick guard to drill into..you would have to drill into wood to install a mini switch. but, you can remove one of your pots and replace with a push/pull pot so that when you pull it out, the bucker is now single or vice versa...look up jimmy page wiring on you tube to see examples...i wouldnt drill into a les paul to install a toggle switch

you can also wire up a tone pot that instead of being a tone control, will be a blend knob...in one full direction it will be humbucker and one full direction the other way will be single and in between, you can blend the levels of the two....this is the most useful method in my opinion unless you really use that tone knob to roll off highs

there are many interesting things you can do once you get comfortable with a soldering iron

also, cover your guitar. i drank too much coffee and was shaky and dripped a big gob of solder on the back and it melted the lacquer....i was so excited that i was rushing to do it...take your time and think it out. its all very very simple actually. after 27 years of playing, this was my first time and it was a breeze after i read some stuff on line and thought about what was going on with the wires and practiced my soldering technique

i bought a radio shack iron with a switch for 25 or 40 watts. i found the 40 watts to be much better for this job especially for the back of the pot

and flux is very good to help disperse the solder

i watched a lot of you tube vids on soldering guitar pots/pick ups etc...and that was all i needed to get the hang of it

[ramonesfreak]

oh, so there are 5 wires...

my pickups had 5 as well. 2 coil split, 2 grounds and 1 hot. i soldered the two grounds to the pot after twisting them together and tinning them....then the hot to the lug on the pot

i would take a bet that the two that are already covered/connected are the split wires. i would also guess the black wire and bare wire are grounds and the red is hot....so, i would assume the bare wire and black wire get connected to the back of the pot, red one to lug and your done but confirm it with him

[ramonesfreak]

btw, coil tap and coil split are 2 different things. i said coil tap above, because it was in my mind after reading you say "tap"...i only say this because if you google coil tap, you may come across info that is not the same as a "split"....people incorrectly interchange these terms by mistake all over the web

those extra wires are for "splitting" the two magnets, not "tapping" them. If the extra wires were not there, you would then have to "tap" into that pickup in order to split it....thats how i understand the difference

[ramonesfreak]

1 last thing...before soldering that bare wire, i would cover it with shrink tube and just leave enough wire to solder it to the pot. i dont understand why that is bare

[WolfeMacleod]

Wow, glad I came home tonight! I've been out since prety early, and wasn't planning on coming back for most of the weekend.

Anyways, on the four conductors...

Red-hot
Black/Bare = Ground.

Green and white are the series link. Leave 'em unless you're splitting.

Red/Green control the slug coil (south)
red = start green = finish

Black/ White control the screw coil (north)
Black = start white =finish


Using the above start/finish stuff, you can find a whole lot of schematics at Guitar Parts & Wiring Diagrams-FREE Shipping Over $49 that will be easy to follow.


On the soldering to the pot stuff, you want sa good, HOT iron. 25 or 35 watts is too low, IMO. A HOT iron will get on and off the pot faster. The faster the better... sitting on the pot, taking too long to heat it up, is what causes them to burn up.

[Nathans_Dad]

Awesome! Thanks Wolfe! I think I'll just install them without the split for nOw and maybe enable the splitting later on.

[Nathans_Dad]

Ok next question. I got the old pickups out and got the pickup covers off. I would like to use the pickup covers on the new Wolfetone pickups because they are nice brushed aluminum and look good with the guitar. When I took the old pickups out they are covered with wax. There is some wax left inside the pickup covers but not much.

Do I need to put some sort of wax inside these things? Should I clean out the old wax? There isn't any wax on Wolfe's pickups.

Other option is just to install the pickups without covers.

What should I do?

[ramonesfreak]

without knowing how the wolfe PUs were designed i have no idea if you should wax em. i wouldnt. did they have wax on them at one point and the last owner removed it? if not, leave them alone and dont try to wax them

if you wanna put the old covers on the new PUs give it a try if the holes line up ok. clean out the old wax from the covers buy dropping them in boiled water or something and dont forget to resolder them to the PUs

personally, i would try em without the covers first

[Nathans_Dad]

Yeah, never mind.

I put em on without the covers and soldered everything up.

WOW!!

I can't believe how much better that guitar sounds now. It's a bit louder but more clear and with really nice upper notes.

Just amazing!!

[ramonesfreak]

yup. were the old ones the 498T and 490R? if so, i tried for 5 years to like them. they were great for extreme distortion and metal but for clear sounds they were awful. muddy, metallic, harsh and painful. im loving my gibson more now with new pickups as well. enjoy

and now that you have seen how easy it is to solder em in, you will be more confident to freely swap pickups just out of curiosity and exploration of new sounds should you be in the mood to try new things

[WolfeMacleod]

ND, glad they went it without (too much of) a hitch.

One thing to note, covers aren't aluminium. Good covers will be made of nickel silver. Some companies use brass as a cheaper alternative, which causes eddy currents and creates a muddier, darker, washed out tone.

The easiest thing to do about waxing covers is to flip the pickup over, and scrape some wax off a plain white candle. Using a hair dryer or heat gun, melt the wax onto the bottom side of the cover and let it wick in between the base-plate and cover. It'll seep down to the bottom and fill any airspace between the top of the pickup and bottom surface of the cover's top, without affectign the coils themselves.

Covers can cause some pretty bad microphonics, especially when they're nickel plated.. the nickel plating interacts with the magnetic field much more than the "raw" nickel silver does.

One last note, if you can make recordings, post 'em up!

[ramonesfreak]

Wolfe, noticed last night that someone did a nice review of your P90 in their SG Classic over on Gear Pages