Checking cap foil lead polarity w/o oscilloscope

[King Fan]

The problem with the ones I used (bought as a bag of 10 on eBay, which is about as good a guarantee of quality and satisfaction with the product as buying from Amazon) is that the sheath insulator is a bit tight, so that the clamping force and bite are reduced. Mueller sells ones that look better, tighter around the wire end, but more capacious where the clip "handle" needs to rotate freely.

Thanks, those are exactly the kinds of ideas I was looking for.

 

[chas.wahl]

The number of throws indicates how many positions the switch has where it makes a connection. Using only the number of positions would make a SPDT switch with an off position in the middle hard to differentiate from a single-deck, 3-position rotary switch (SP3T).

For toggle switches, the usual nomenclature is on-on for two positions, on-off-on for three and parentheses around the momentary positions, e.g., (on)-off-(on).

Thank you for that information. Here's the sort of thing that confuses me: if I go to Mouser and search for DPDT toggle switches, I get (7273!) something like this

One way I can imagine that all these DPDT switches with 3 positions are possible is if they have, say, 6 lugs, 3 for each pole, and they're the weird type that when you move the toggle to center, only one pole's contacts are changed, and then when you move the toggle to the opposite side from the one you started at, the other pole follows suit, in other words:
xxo > oxx > oxx
xxo > xxo > oxx

Of course, that's not possible with a slide switch, or I don't imagine it is.

 

[chas.wahl]

An even cheaper way of doing this might be to use a DP3T switch of the type used in the Fender Mustang.

Well, I don't wish to seem perseverative about this, but I did take a look at Mustang switches. Of course several mfgrs products are sold for this particular usage, but I suspect that the "original" was a Switchcraft model, and it looks to me like exactly the sort of thing I used in my little box: a DP3T slide switch with 8 lugs. Seems to me that the only way it might be different is if it were, like the Fender/Oak 3-way switch, a make-before-break type, unlike the one I used, which definitely isn't. But the Switchcraft datasheet doesn't say that it is, and when I searched online generally for a make-before-break slide switch, I couldn't find one.

So, my guess is that while using such a switch would be cheaper than using your suggestion of the Fender 3-way, one would still need a spst momentary switch to (manually) short the sleeve and tip -- unless one likes a loud interval between the two polarities.

The question I'm left with is: why doesn't the Fender Mustang make a loud pop when both slide switches are moved to center, to mute both pickups? Unless the slide switches are make-before-break, then it seems to me there's an open input circuit when both switches are centered, muting both pickups.

Maybe I should be asking this on the Tele-technical subforum, or on OffsetGuitars.com.