Coil Splitting/Mini Toggles

[LJD]

I have 53/10's with the extra wire for coil splitting and I want to add a mini toggle(s) to take advantage of the splitting. Most splitting pickups are 4 conductor, I only see one white wire on mine. Are there dual wires inside the white or does PRS do it a different way? Is a SPDT mini toggle (3 lugs) per pickup usable for the split? Thanks.

 

[John Beef]

Have you ever hooked up a 4 conductor cable to do coil splitting before? If so, you know how you take two wires and connect them together on the same lug on the coil split switch? That's in essence what you're doing here, only with one wire, the white wire. You only need one wire to do coil splitting, one wire for hot, and one wire (or braided shielding) for ground. 4 conductor pickups from Duncan or DiMarzio give you more wires for more options than just splitting. You can do series/parallel coils, split to one coil then to the other coil, stuff like that. 53/10 pickups are just wired to enable splitting (unless they're meant to be wired to the rotary or CU24 5 way blade switch but that's another show).

http://www.prsguitars.com/csc/schematics/schem08/mira.pdf

I don't know what model you're installing these to but if you have an extra switch (not a push/pull pot) you'll want to wire it up like a Mira. Also, yes, SPDT will work if you're just doing one pickup, or if you have one switch for each pickup.

 

[LJD]

Thanks John Beef, that's helpful. I'm adding the toggles to a HBII (removing the piezo system, putting the 2 toggles in place of the blend knob and mini 3 way). So according to that, I just need to attach the white wire to one of the outer lugs, and ground the center lug?

With the piezo pcb out, I bridge the connection from the tone pot to the volume pot (as seen in the HBII schematic), and connect volume pot to the output jack. Right?

 

[John Beef]

I believe you have it correct, sounds about right. However, I would highly recommend testing everything out before mounting it in the guitar... fishing all that stuff in and out the F hole is sheer madness, at least on a 335 style. Maybe the PRS hollowbodies you can go through the bridge pickup?

 

[LJD]

Is it okay to daisy chain the mini toggle center lugs to the ground on the back of the tone pot? Looks like that in the Sig Ltd schematics.

 

[Boogie]

...I just need to attach the white wire to one of the outer lugs, and ground the center lug?

Yep. Grounding the split coil lead is all that's necessary.