Flat top LP - Koa on Mahogany

[Cagey]

The push-pull pots I got from Warmoth looked like this, in and out respectively...

Do those look like the ones you have? If so, there really isn't a way to push the shaft through the body of the thing. However, you'll notice that the diameter of the threaded tube the pot's shaft goes through is thinner (1/4") than it is on a regular 2W part. If you drilled the guitar for standard pots (3/8" hole), installing one of these would likely be so loose as to let the entire pot push through the body's top.

If it turns out that's the case, you can get push-pull pots w/ 3/8" shafts like a regular 2W pot has from here.

 

[bagman67]

The pots that fell apart were the standard open-bodied 500k doodads that Warmoth supply - not the switching pots.  You can't see it in the photo here, but the bottom is open to the summer night's air, rather than a flat pot-metal bottom.  The aperture is about two-thirds the diameter of the entire pot.

I may just forgo the whole parallel-series switching thing and wire it as a conventional 2 pup/2 vol/2 tone Lester and, to use your phrase, Cagey, call it a love story.  Plus I won't have to translate wire colors from Dimarzio to Duncan quite so much as I work on it.  It'll certainly save wear and tear on my stock of swear words.

 

[Cagey]

Ah, I see. When you talked about "pushing on knobs", I don't know why but I made an erroneous jump to push-pull pots. Given enough force, the ones you have can have the shaft push through.

It's tough to find robust pots these days, but they do exist. If you want to spend a couple extra bucks, these Clarostat parts are the best there is. $13/ea. for 500K log part, but they last forever. They're sealed, and made of stainless. Problem might be the shaft, though. As you can see, they're designed for set-screw knobs.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Okay, so we're underway again.


Turns out the shielded cable I bought to wire things up is too fat to fit through the holes between the switch cavity and the pickup cavity, and between the pickup cavity and the control cavity.


So I took finer wire and jury rigged a solution:  Four strands (from the bridge volume pot, from the neck volume pot, ground, and hot out), wrapped them in kitchen aluminum foil, and passed them through a heat-shrink sleeve.  So now the switch is wired up, and off we go to start wiring pots.  Should be fun... two humbuckers, 3-way, two volumes, two tones with push-pull pots, wired for series/parallel.


Off we go...

I use this stuff for the run to the switch. Works nicely.