Help Wiring a Telecaster with four way and hot rails

[Stratoman85]

Can anybody help me out with a telecaster project? I have a roadworn telecaster, and I have the modding bug. I have a hot rails in the bridge right now, and I really like it. I want to put a hot rails in the neck also and convert the vol and tone knobs to push/pulls to split the coils--vol for neck and tone for bridge. I also have a 4-way switch installed, where the extra position is the the two pickups in series.

Can anyone tell a total bozo how to wire this up? I have a little experience installing pickups, but I've never messed around with "trick" wiring like this.

Thanks!

 

[Steve Holt]

Do hot rails have a 4 conductor wire? If so do you know what the colors correlate to?

 

[Peegoo]

Swap in a 4-way in place of this 3-way in this diagram:

 

[Peegoo]

Here's how to incorporate the 4-way switch.

The 'neck ground' wire in this diagram is the Green Wire ONLY from the neck pickup in the diagram above. Attach the plain silver wire from the neck pickup to the back of the volume pot.

 

[redhouse_ca]

Can anybody help me out with a telecaster project? I have a roadworn telecaster, and I have the modding bug. I have a hot rails in the bridge right now, and I really like it. I want to put a hot rails in the neck also and convert the vol and tone knobs to push/pulls to split the coils--vol for neck and tone for bridge. I also have a 4-way switch installed, where the extra position is the the two pickups in series.

Can anyone tell a total bozo how to wire this up? I have a little experience installing pickups, but I've never messed around with "trick" wiring like this.

Thanks!

Not sure if you got what you wanted but I’ve spent the past few weeks wiring the same guitar a bunch of different ways and I think I got a pretty good feel for options (and a bunch of wiring diagrams). Im also amongst the worlds worst solderers (even tho I’ve been doing it since I was a kid) and I wanted this clean so I figured out a few tricks with clamps and things to steady my hands that might be helpful. If you use the “new” cts push/pull puts, there not a lot of 1. Depending on the tele, there may not be a lot of space around it to ground to casing and still fit in the guitar (both sides - unless you ground inside the curves of the case, and no option on the bottom (just sides). I dunno if any of this is helpful but I got mine pretty good, IMHO and happy to share ideas.

 

[Deaf Eddie]

You can't use the S-D drawing posted above and still get the full function of the 4-way. You must route the neck's coil-shunt lead from the p/p to the neck pickup's negative lead (not ground) on the 4-way.

I'll work up a drawing combining the two ideas... stay tuned!

 

[Deaf Eddie]

This works for the Seymour Duncan color code. The black is hot, the green is negative (aka ground), and the red and white are the series pair. ALL pickups should have a bare ground lead, which always goes to ground and is NEVER switched.

If you have a different brand of pickups and need help translating the color code, let me know.

 

[gabrius]

Another good starting point is this schema by Seymour Duncan where the shunted coils on neck and bridge pickups are inverted so to have hum cancellation when the splitted pickups are working together (parallel and series positions)