Installing Little 59 in Tele bridge

[DaBears]

I'm trying to install a Little 59 in the bridge position of my American Standard Telecaster. I have very little knowledge of electronics. When I took the bridge off my Tele, I'm seeing something weird. There's a screw in the bottom of the cavity with a plate attached to it. The ground wire from the stock pickup is attached to this plate. There's one wire coming off the plate that goes nowhere. It's just sitting there with one bare end inside the cavity. There's another wire coming off the plate that goes to the back of the volume pot.

Should I attach my ground wire to this plate, or should I remove all this and just attach it directly to the back of the pot? Any idea on why this would be there?

 

[Artie]

If you're keeping the stock Fender neck pup, then do this:

Don't worry about the unattached wire. It will come off with the old pup. (It should have been attached to that plate.)

Attach the Lil 59 bare wire to either the plate in the body or the back of a pot. Both should be ground.
Also, solder the Lil 59 black wire to the back of a pot.
Solder red & white together, and tape them off so they don't touch anything.
Connect the Lil 59 green wire to the switch where the current bridge pup hot wire is.

That should do it.

And let us know how you like that Tele Lil 59.

 

[DaBears]

I understand if I use the black wire as the hot, the pickups will be out of phase, correct? I thought I might do that because I almost never use the middle position on my guitars. I use the neck pickup for clean and mildly overdriven bluesy stuff, and use the bridge pickup when I want to rock out. I thought maybe it would give me an interesting option to have the out of phase thing in the middle position. I don't intend to ever sell the guitar. It's the first guitar I ever owned with a maple fretboard and I absolutely love it.

 

[Artie]

Yes. That's no prob. And if you don't like it later, you can always just flip black and green.