New wiring day: 5-way rotary to McCarty switching.

pauloqs

PRS McCarty
Joined
Feb 2, 2019
Messages
413
I rewired my CU22 with 5-way rotary to a 3-way toggle with push/pull tone pot, McCarty switching style. I’m super happy with the results. Much easier than I expected. Also, thank you @gush for the clarification regarding the grounding of the pickups not displayed in the wiring diagrams. Here’s the final results.

VKqQDCo.jpg


Forgive the bad lighting. Since I had to order parts, I added a pair or lampshade knobs. I like those both in looks and feel better than the stock speed knobs.
 
Well done.

Thank you. I’m really proud of it too. The solder joints look super clean. I’ve watched a few Phil McKnight, StewMac and other videos online to improve my soldering technique and I'm amazed what a difference it made to follow their tips. I've rather enjoyed the process as well.
 
I was just about to make a post about wanting to do the opposite - take my McCarty wired CU22 with a 3 way toggle and push pull back to a 5 way rotary. I have the original pot, but I have no idea what solders where. Any help would be appreciated.
 
I was just about to make a post about wanting to do the opposite - take my McCarty wired CU22 with a 3 way toggle and push pull back to a 5 way rotary. I have the original pot, but I have no idea what solders where. Any help would be appreciated.

Here is the schematics that was on mine. Mine was the bottom one. The bare ground wire of the pickups and and the ground of the output jack were connected to the top of the tone pot, which is not depicted in the following schematics.

https://www.prsguitars.com/documents/prs_custom5wayrotary_pre_2007.pdf
 
I was just about to make a post about wanting to do the opposite - take my McCarty wired CU22 with a 3 way toggle and push pull back to a 5 way rotary. I have the original pot, but I have no idea what solders where. Any help would be appreciated.
The prs guitars website has all the wiring schematics for all the models. Going back to the rotary switching is pretty easy as long as your pickups are 3 wire.

If your pickups aren't stock from when it was wired for rotary you may have to wire one pickup backwards or out of phase.
 
Thanks guys. I forgot to mention that my guitar is a 2011 with Dragon 2s...I’ll look into the schematics and open her up when I get a chance.
 
Thanks guys. I forgot to mention that my guitar is a 2011 with Dragon 2s...I’ll look into the schematics and open her up when I get a chance.
Well my CE 22 came stock with Dragon IIs and a 5-way rotary, so I’d assume they’d be compatible.
 
Back
Top