Fender pickup wire oddness.

Richardj

Thought it would be a good idea to look at the wiring on my newly acquired '04 Am Dlx Strat as I wanted the original bridge pickup in there rather than the neck Lil '59 it came with.  It has the SCN pickups connected to an S1 switch which looks (and is) a bit complicated.  Weird thing about this one is that the SCNs only have two wires, whereas all of the pics and wiring diagrams show three (coloured hot, black ground and green chassis ground).  Have these been messed with and do I need to put them back to three wires to get everything to work properly?

WezV

The two grounds are connected.  That's fine for normal use but you would need to break the connection and add a wire for any phase switching

ICBM

Yes - and for the series-parallel switching that the S1 does… at least in theory. In practice it will still work fine as it is, it's just that you may get slightly more noise in the series mode because one of the shields won't be grounded.

Whether that's noticeable or not, I don't know - it's not like a covered humbucker where the cover would then become 'hot', there's far less shielding on these. I would try it as it is, and if there's no problem then don't worry about it. The most likely problem is getting buzz if you touch the polepieces, but I'm not sure if they're grounded on these, I've never taken one apart.