Ok...What Did I Do Wrong ?

[Mickster]

Sort of on a whim....I decided I wanted to have an HSH strat. I took a loaded standard SSS Squire strat pickguard and removed all the electronics as one single wired system. I bought a strat HSH pickguard. I left the old strat single coil middle pickup in the wire harness....removed the neck and bridge single coils.....and soldered in two old Ibanez humbuckers I had.....neck and bridge.....both measured between 7k and 9k as I recall. I left the 5 position switch wired as it was along with the 3 pots and installed them in the new pickguard and onto the guitar. So.....the neck and middle and bridge pickups sound as I expected (not bad actually) when selected by position 1, 3 and 5.....but.....when selecting switch position 2 or 4 I get sound but very low volume and not at all like a combination of the middle and bridge or neck pickup. The sound when played is very high and thin and low volume. And to my surprise.....the sound is exactly the same using position 2 or 4. There's no difference. I need to learn here......so educate me please.

 

[Papanate]

You wired something backwards would be my guess - since it’s the middle combinations - and the Middle sounds good by itself - I’m thinking its
the Ibanez humbuckers - are they two wire or four wire? I would wire one Humbucker and Single direct and see what happens.

 

[Mickster]

You're probably onto something. The neck Ibanez humbucker is 2 wire and the bridge humbucker is actually 3 wire. Both came from the same Ibanez Gio series guitar. I wasn't sure how to wire them into the strat wire harness.....but I took resistance readings on the 2 wire neck pickup and it was around 7k as I recall. I measured the 3 wire neck pickup and one lead was around 3k?????? The other was around 7k so I just used the 7k lead and left the other one open. Since I made no changes to the original 5 position switch wiring...the pots wiring.....and the leads to the middle pup (from how they originally were on the squire strat) I'm stumped. (Disclaimer....it's not hard to stump me) So you're saying....wire one humbucker in at a time to see what happens right?

 

[RFR]

Sounds like the middle pickup is out of phase with the humbuckers.

As to the 3 wire humbucker….. it used to be that splitting a pickup used 4 wires. Two were soldered together and when they touched ground it shorted out one coil giving you a single coil sound. 3 wire is the same thing, it’s just that the two wires are soldered together internally.
In olden days with 4 wires and the right switches you could have a humbucker go single coil, series/parralel, out of phase. Remember all those damn 80s guitars with all the switches? Well, people don’t use that shit now. Capability to go single coil is plenty.

Different manufacturers use different color codes so it can be hard to tell which wire is ground and which is hot.

Flip the wires on the middle pickup and you should be fine