After procrastinating for several weeks over which way to approach it, today I finally completed the wiring harness for the ES175. It was a mammoth undertaking, spread over 3 days. The reason for the complexity was my choice to try a 6-way freeway switch, instead of the normal 3-way. It's pretty neat - allowing the following pickup combinations:
I wired it up using a nice set of 500KOhm CTS pots, as well as orange-caps for the tone circuits. This baby should purr! I dithered a little while, wondering whether to use multi-strand shielded wire or just my plain old single-core shielded wire from Stewmac. In the end I went with the single core as it's what I have always used. I also toyed with the idea of not soldering the pickup wires directly to the switch to give me the option of swapping the pickups out in the future. In the end I decided that this wasn't a very likely scenario (given how awesome these GFS Nashville Retrotron pickups are said to be) and therefore there was no point tying myself up in knots over it. The damn circuit was complicated enough without adding more wires to the mix!
In the end the wiring harness came out OK. The harness is, well, kinda neat and hopefully wont be seen through the f-holes. I did a quick tap-test on the pickups to make sure things were working as planned (this tests pickup signals but not tone pots). Everything passes muster at the moment.
The wiring in and around the freeway switch is pretty complicated, however. Let's hope I don't break anything during installation and have to troubleshoot it. Now that would be a bitch.
Fortunately, the hollow-body promises to be a much easier installation than with the 335. I can take all the pots down through the pickup holes and there's plenty of depth to make sure the wires don't get in each others way. Here's hoping anyway. See you at the finish line!
Lots of cool single-coil goodness is on offer, but what a sow this thing is to wire up! See what I mean?
I wired it up using a nice set of 500KOhm CTS pots, as well as orange-caps for the tone circuits. This baby should purr! I dithered a little while, wondering whether to use multi-strand shielded wire or just my plain old single-core shielded wire from Stewmac. In the end I went with the single core as it's what I have always used. I also toyed with the idea of not soldering the pickup wires directly to the switch to give me the option of swapping the pickups out in the future. In the end I decided that this wasn't a very likely scenario (given how awesome these GFS Nashville Retrotron pickups are said to be) and therefore there was no point tying myself up in knots over it. The damn circuit was complicated enough without adding more wires to the mix!
In the end the wiring harness came out OK. The harness is, well, kinda neat and hopefully wont be seen through the f-holes. I did a quick tap-test on the pickups to make sure things were working as planned (this tests pickup signals but not tone pots). Everything passes muster at the moment.
The wiring in and around the freeway switch is pretty complicated, however. Let's hope I don't break anything during installation and have to troubleshoot it. Now that would be a bitch.
Fortunately, the hollow-body promises to be a much easier installation than with the 335. I can take all the pots down through the pickup holes and there's plenty of depth to make sure the wires don't get in each others way. Here's hoping anyway. See you at the finish line!
No comments:
Post a Comment