1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

[Mathías Gabriel Rock]

Hey there!

I have been searching information about this but I haven't found anything helpful, so I would be very grateful if anyone could give me some tips.


The story: I bought a LTD EC200QM a couple of months ago. It's not a superb guitar, but I really like the things I can do with it.
It comes with some nice pup's for the price, but as I really like how it sounds unplugged, I decided to change them for some original SD ones in order to get the best out of it.

And that's all I did. Bought Alternative 8 for the bridge, and Alnico II PRO Slash for the neck (the weirdest combo ever, I know).


The first one replaced was the bridge one, and the brand new SD Alternative 8 did exaclty what I wanted: More character, power, you know what I mean.


Now, the problem is that one feature that I use A LOT is coil splitting, and as you may be thinking, those Alnico II come with only ONE conductor, and it can't be coil splitted.

The question is, is it possible to take a 1 conductor humbucker and make it a 4 conductor one?

Thanks!

 

[eviltobz]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

>The question is, is it possible to take a 1 conductor humbucker and make it a 4 conductor one?[/B]

with a bit of solder-based surgery, yes. is the pup covered? if so you'll need to unsolder the blobs on the back to get the cover off, and probably melt a bit of wax to get to the connections. if not, then it's just a matter of unwinding some of the tape. one end of each of the coils will go to the current wire (one for ground, one for hot), possibly via the baseplate or something for extra groundingness, and there is a connection between the 2 coils. you could remove the current wire and put in a 4 conductor one, or just attach an additional wire to this mid point. if you look at wiring diagrams you'll see that for a simple coil split you attach both wires to the same point anyway, so it's electrically identical.

 

[darthphineas]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

I think SD charges about $20 to do that for you.


Sent from my armored battle station using Tapatalk

 

[uOpt]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

Hold on a sec. If all you want is a coil split then you don't need to go 4-conductor plus shield.

You can simply run a plain wire to the point between the coils and shortcut one of the coils with a switch by putting it to ground. Even the noise from this unshielded wire is usually acceptable, it's not that a Strat does anything else. Or you can keep the length of the wire short by using a mounting ring with a switch, but really just a plain wire inserted between the coils does the job just fine.

 

[Mathías Gabriel Rock]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

Thank you!

It seems very easy. All I wanted to do was asking before messing up such a nice SD pup.

eviltobz: It is not covered! I am going to take some pictures of the procedure as soon as I start.

The first step is to take it out from the guitar, after that I'll see how I proceed.


uOpt: I think I prefer doing all the wiring again, but that's not a bad idea at all!


Thanks again to all of you.

(sorry for my English)

 

[eviltobz]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

Hold on a sec. If all you want is a coil split then you don't need to go 4-conductor plus shield.

You can simply run a plain wire to the point between the coils and shortcut one of the coils with a switch by putting it to ground. Even the noise from this unshielded wire is usually acceptable, it's not that a Strat does anything else. Or you can keep the length of the wire short by using a mounting ring with a switch, but really just a plain wire inserted between the coils does the job just fine.

if only someone had mentioned that already...

you could remove the current wire and put in a 4 conductor one, or just attach an additional wire to this mid point.

 

[Mathías Gabriel Rock]

Re: 1 conductor / wire humbucker coil split

Well, I did my homework.

It has that big-shielded cable coming from the hot output (NS), two white cables attached under tape (NF & SS) and one remaining black cable (SF) soldered to the metallic part of the pup. I am going to attach a cable to the white cables joint and solder it to the push-pull pot. It should work, I guess.

I'll try to post some photos later. I am currently at work so I don't have my camera with me and my phone takes horrible pictures..

Thank you for your help!


PD: There´s wax all over the place. I wonder how important is that.. I think that I should re-wax it some day.