Seeing Red

Now that I'm back on the mainland, it's time to catch up on some projects on the bench. Many many projects. But, ve can only take zem one at ze time, yes?

You may recall (or not...) some 'teaser' posts a while back on Something Good That Is Coming This Way. Well, it is here. In person, on the workbench. It's this mutant Telecaster I have and it's going to get souped up.

First order of business is to take off the old control plate.  I had to unsolder the pickup wires and the output wires. Here you see the plate removed from the geetar body. Now I'm a-gonna wire up the new control plate. I went back and forth (and back and forth and back and forth...) pondering whether or not I should use the old stock Fender plate. In the end, I decided to go with a new one from Callaham Guitars. The Fender plate is chrome and it's a bit too shiny for my taste. The Callaham plate is polished to look like nickel and I think it's a bit more 'vintage' looking.


On the top in the picture you see the old one, and the new one is on the bottom.

What we're gonna wind up with is 4-way switching to enable the choice of both pickups in series, along with the conventional stock neck/neck and bridge in parallel/bridge alone wiring of a stock 'modern' Tele. In addition,  I have a 250K pot with a push-pull switch that I'm using to switch between the two taps on a Don Mare "2-speed Stingray" bridge pickup.

I took the volume control off the old plate and am using it on the new one - it's got a real fast rotation which is great for volume effects. Not that I'm any good at them, mind you, but the pot that's on there is great for them.

At this point, the new plate has the 4-way switch, the volume pot, and the push-pull switch on it.  You can also see the 'treble bleed' filter circuit I already had on the volume control.  It's a 220K resistor and an .001 cap in parallel - it prevents treble from rolling off when you turn the volume down.  I have that circuit on all my geetars.