Wiring question/snafu

[Chug Porter]

First post. Long time lurker.

I have a wiring problem that's driving me nuts. I have a HB/S/S strat setup, with switches for each pup. Two volumes and one master tone. What I'm trying to do (and how it worked just fine before I rewired it) is to have the vols be independent of each other, and not tied into each other like a LP. The pots are 500 for HB and 250 for SC's and tone. I've tried a few different things, and I swear I rewired it like it was before, but alas and alack, not only are the vols tied to each other, but the pups won't even turn off. Frustrating. The last thing I tried was removing the treble bleed mod from both vol pots, but that did nothing. I've scoured this and other forums, all of the wiring websites, and I just can't find the detail that I'm missing.

So, I thought a few hundred potential fresh sets of eyes might be able to shed some clarity to this. I would be much appreciative if you could look at my crappy drawing/photo and tell me where I'm going wrong. Again, the treble bleed mods have been removed. The switches should be wired for on/off for the SC pups, and series/off/parallel for the HB. Thank you in advance and if you're in the PNW of the States, I'll owe you a beer or 6.

Cheers,
Dave

[CTN]

Re: Wiring question/snafu

I think you may have wired your single coil on/off switches wrong. They're not actually doing any switching because the wires are essentially hard wired to the volume pot and ground, and the hot signal of the pickups never gets grounded. I have no idea why you have that thin black jumper connecting the two middle lugs of the single coil on/off switches.

On a DPDT switch, middle contacts are common to both switch positions.


So what you gotta do is this

A0: Pickup lead (red)
A1: out to volume pot
A2: Jumpered to B2.
B0: pickup lead (black+bare) & jumpered to B1. This jumper is very important for grounding the whole pickup when turned off.
B1: out to the common ground on the volume pot case.

That way, the ground is always grounded, and the hot signal gets switched between going to the volume pot lug (position 1) or getting grounded (position 2).

[Chug Porter]

Re: Wiring question/snafu

Sweet! Thanks for looking at it. I will fix those things this afternoon. I, too, was wondering about the jumper between the two switches. I had it on the old wiring, so I just redid it that way, although it didn't make any sense to me. The reason for this whole rewire was that I built this guitar over 20 years ago, and it's been worked on by many people, competent and not (including me, although I'm way more competent now that I was then), and things were generally just a mess. Just needed a complete overhaul. I'll report back as soon as finish.