Making trialing pickups easier (swapping) - What am I thinking of?

SquireJapan

I've got a _massive_ collection of pickups I've bought over many many years, and I'm slowly actually trying them all.

Currently I just have a single humbucker guitar wired up, with a ground/signal wire coming off the pot - it's to that I just solder the humbucker. Works well, and makes life a lot easier.

What I was thinking of though, was a way to do this for HH, or HSH guitars - I really like the Schaller Megaswitches. Is there something whereby I can wire up all the connections to the switch, and then just have a single "tab" on something where I just easily solder each individual wire from each pickup.

I feel like I've seen such things before, but can't find them searching. 

I was just going to use a small connector block and just screw down the wires into that - I feel that would be about the same effort as soldering.

This is very much a temporary thing, as I've in the region of 50 or so pickups - I just want to try them all and make swapping less of a faff.

Please do feel free to tell me how stupid the whole endeavour is. 

Sporky

I did something similar for testing pedal circuits before adding jacks and switches, with a block like this for the in, out, ground, and power. You could do similar - quicker and easier than soldering and desoldering.

This isn't what I used, but it's similar. 

https://www.rapidonline.com/camblock-plus-cstbp508h-5-5-08mm-horizontal-screwless-terminal-block-5p-20-3707

Funkfingers

Screw-down terminals are a good idea - as used on John East bass pre-amps and some Six String Supplies PCB guitar wiring harnesses. Alegree is also offering solderless control assemblies.

IMO, the easiest approach for HSH format guitars is to have a dedicated testbed guitar onto which interchangeable pickguards can be slotted without removing the strings. Some of the Fender Gilmour signature Stratocaster prototypes were like this.

I vaguely recall that Ash at @OilCityPickups ; has something along these lines. At least one photograph of it appeared in a thread at about the time he had moved to his current workshop premises. Try sending him a PM.

SquireJapan

Thanks - I'll need to find some small ones then. Screw down would be ideal by the sounds of it.

I have an Ibanez RG (with a floyd), with pickup rings. That means that I can just un-hook the trem springs and have easy access to the pickup. Access to wiring is at the back. It's a good guitar for such things, plus it's by far my favourite style of guitar.

gretschthumper

I used these little 5 pin connects for mine:



Really easy to solder to, & you can put all 4 wires of a humbucker on them, for more elaborate wiring tests…

The guitar wasn’t a great success, as it was too difficult to change the pickups over, but I saw PRS using one in a video the other day which looked better, so I might give it another go:

SquireJapan

I think have have the formation of an idea here. I have a bunch of screw down terminals for when I was messing about with some electronics, but they're meant to be mounted to a PCB.

I need to get some old fashioned "strip board" stuff and simply solder them to that, then I can solder the terminals of the switch to the same. 

Doing crazy wiring things is exactly what I want to test. The switches I like are these - they're mental with the options available:

https://schaller.info/en/megaswitch-m

Will report back ... need to buy some veroboards (sp?)