Vintage double conductor H + 4 conductor H - wiring?

[Snake101st]

Hey how's it going?

Totally new to building here, so please bare with me

I just bought a Warmoth mooncaster neck, Rosser starcaster looking body, mastery bridge + trem, etc but am a bit confused at how to best wire it up once I get there.

The pickups I got are a McNelly stagger swagger v1 in the neck (vintage double conductor, didn't realize that when ordering) and an OX4 low wind humbucker w A5 (4 wire/conductor). The body is routed for a 3 way toggle and a volume and tone pot, and I didn't have an option there really.

My question is, is it possible to wire it so the neck pickup acts as a standard pickup with no options, and the bridge is partial coil split using the Fralin/PRS method w a resistor on one push pull DPDT pot and potentially have the two pickups wired in series or parallel on the other push pull DPDT pot?

Or because the neck pickup is double conductor and needs to have the outer braiding act as the ground and soldered to the pot + just use the hot wire to make it active, are my options limited? I'd be ok with only being able to partially split the bridge 4 wire pup and just not make use of the other push/pull, unless anyone has other ideas for what I can do with just one 4 wire pickup and 1 vol / 1 tone.

If anyone has wiring diagrams that'd match up with what Im saying too, I'd really appreciate it - just tried looking for about two hours and every diagram seems to assume that both pickups are 4 wire. Really not advanced enough to mod the vintage double conductor (where the braiding is the ground) to work like a 4 wire, so that's out heh

Here's the Fralin method I mentioned:

https://humbuckersoup.com/lindy-fralin-partial-tap-resistor/

Thanks!

 

[stratamania]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

My question is, is it possible to wire it so the neck pickup acts as a standard pickup with no options, and the bridge is partial coil split using the Fralin/PRS method w a resistor on one push pull DPDT pot and potentially have the two pickups wired in series or parallel on the other push pull DPDT pot?

By Dual conductor I assume the neck pickup has a vintage style hot and ground available to wire. I am not familiar with a stagger swagger and have not heard of one until now.

There is no reason why you could not as you have a two wire standard humbucker in the neck.

Or because the neck pickup is double conductor and needs to have the outer braiding act as the ground and soldered to the pot + just use the hot wire to make it active, are my options limited? I'd be ok with only being able to partially split the bridge 4 wire pup and just not make use of the other push/pull, unless anyone has other ideas for what I can do with just one 4 wire pickup and 1 vol / 1 tone.

The outer braid needs to be grounded and the hot wire needs to go to your switch or wherever your wiring would dictate. You can always solder a wire to the outer braid to run to a ground point if needed.

Your bridge pickup has four wires so can run as a humbucker in series/parallel or split in combination with your other pickup.

Another alternate for your neck pickup is to use a switch to put it in and out of phase with your bridge pickup.

 

[Snake101st]

Thanks so much for the quick reply and welcoming me here! I've actually seen a bunch of your posts while researching

You're right about the vintage style of the neck pickup.

Really appreciate it, I'd have to probably need to just use a combination of wiring schematics to reference and just make sure I don't mix things up. Or, since this is my first attempt, I could keep it simple and just wire them both up as if they were 2 wire (leaving the push/pull inactive) following a seymour duncan diagram I saw for 4 wire pickups, then if for some reason I feel like more tonal options are needed I can mess with the bridge setup more.

Maybe I was just trying to get too fancy when it's better to keep it simple for a first try - something I've been known to do with other things in life too.

If anyone has any tips or info to share that you think would be useful for me to reference later, please let me know.

Thanks again!

 

[stratamania]

Feel free to ask questions or verify in the future...