Re: wiring h/s/h question...please help!
There's no danger involved ;D, and it'll be a cool learning experience even if you don't succeed first time. The worst than can happen is you'll lose the 13 bucks you paid for the switch...
I can't promise you won't burn your fingers a bit as well.
You'll need a soldering iron, obviously, preferably a 25W with a needle point or at least a very small tip. You'll also need a desoldering pump or, as i call it, a soldersucker! This is like a spring loaded syringe with a heat resistant teflon tip. You press the plunger down until it locks then heat the solder up and press the trigger. Hey presto, the solder's sucked into the nozzle.
What you have to do is remove the PCB from the switch contacts. There are 28 of these little suckers so get the coffee pot on, fire up your iPod and get set for a long night...
If you are feeling
really ambitious you could try making your own PCB to replace it; you can get PCB etching kits, i guess from Radio Shack if you're in the States (are you?) and you can get an etch resist pen to mark out the tracks for a one off project like this.
More importantly, you need to establish what the pin protocol of the switch is.
DON'T PANIC!
I'm almost certain that what you are dealing with is a stack of four wafers each of which is a switch in its own right, so although there are 28 pins you only need to concentrate on seven.
Of these seven pins one will be a slider which makes contact with each of the others in sequence. I'm willing to bet it will be one of the pins on the end but I may be wrong so you need to do some meter testing. I hope you've got one or can borrow one otherwise we won't get very far...
With the meter on the continuity beeper turn the switch fully to one extreme. Locate one probe on the end pin and then touch the other probe to each of the other pins in turn. You'll get a beep when it makes contact. Make a note of which pins were in contact.
Move the switch through one step then repeat the process. Make a note of the pins which were in contact. One of them will be the same. This one is the slider. It may help to have a couple of OHP pens to hand (overhead projector pens; what we used before computers and PowerPoint), one red, one blue. You could mark the sliders with red and the pickup contacts with blue.
Once you've established which the slider contacts are, you then have to establish the contact sequence. This is almost certainly linear, but you need to check to be certain.
Proceeding on the assumption that it's a linear sequence, this is how you program it logically.
Assign one wafer to each pickup and decide which position you want each pickup to appear in.
For example, you assign wafer A to the bridge pickup. You want this pickup in positions 1,2 and 6, so you connect pins 1,2 and 6
You assign the middle pickup to wafer B and you want this pickup in positions 2,3 and 4 so you connect these.
You assign the neck pickup to wafer C and you want this pickup in positions 4,5 and 6 so you connect these pins.
You then make connections between all the connected pins and take the output from these.
It should look something like this
You'll have one wafer left over which you can use for tone switching or coil splitting.
I'm not sure how much room you'll have betwen the contact pins. going by the size of the chicken head knob it looks pretty cramped. I'd suggest using 5 amp fuse wire to make the connections. solder it to pin 1A first, then thrad it round pins 2A, 2B, 3B, 4B, 4C, 5C, 6C, then slip a bit of heat shrink tubing over it and make a jumper back to 6A. You should have nine contact pins connected by the time you've finished.
If there's anything you're unclear on let me know and i'll try and clarify.
Best of luck. Who Dares, Wins and all that.
