Repair And Restoration
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blower switch plus wiring
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blower switch plus wiring
I had a customer that wanted a blower switch installed on his James Tyler HSS style Strat. Simple enough, except that he wanted the full humbucker to go through the volume pot as well. The HB was a 4 wire and incorporated a toggle switch to split coils. I scratched my head for a while, drew up a diagram and breadboarded it. It requires a 6PDT switch which was the hardest part of this job to find something that fits. When the switch is thrown, the neck and middle PUPS short to ground to mute, the coil split connection to ground of the HB is lifted, and the 5 way switch output goes open to switch the HB straight to the volume pot. I had 2 days to turn this around in my busy shop over the weekend. It works. Just wondering how others might have approached this? The picture is my breadboard test. I’ll try to put a final pic up of the switch and guts soon. Thanks. As I write this, I realize that I could have used a 3PDT switch and not implemented the coil mute/grounding of the single coils. Leave it to me to make it more complicated than needed.
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5 Replies
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I bet @gerryhayes knows a thing or two about something like this. I’ll reach out to him.
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Hey Scott. Here’s how I decided to skin this particular cat. I used a 4PDT. And, as luck would have it, a Fender S1 works quite well for the job if you don’t want to try fit in that extra toggle.
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Thanks Gerry. That’s a great solution. I’ll look into the S1 Fender switch. In my case, the customer wanted to leave the existing coil split toggle switch. They also wanted the blower selected HB to go through the volume/tone circuit instead of straight out the jack.
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Ah. Missed the bit about wanting vol and tone on the blower. I think if you’re happy with an S1, this will do it. Just interrupts the middle and neck pickups. Don’t ground them in this scenario as it could pull everything down to ground depending on the selector position.
It’s pretty much what you’d already figured out. Engaging it breaks the coil-split ground, breaks the neck and mid feeds to the switch and shunts the bridge directly to the volume pot input. Makes sense in my head. Hope it makes sense in wire and solder. I’ve shown the S1 as the volume here.
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Thanks Gerry. Good to know I was on the right path. The S1 switch should be more robust than the Neve console 6PDT I used. I do like the plunger action to engage the blower on this job, but the switch may not hold up over 1000s of cycles.
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