*** Solved *** Wiring Question - Schaller Pickups

BillDL

I have two Fender Flame Standard model guitars from 1985.  They were from the Master Series that were made in Japan and included the Flame and the Esprit (double cut chambered solidbodies) and a hollow jazz guitar named the d'Aquisto.  The Flame and the Esprit are very similar in overall appearance but the Esprit, that went on to transition into a Robben Ford model, has a slightly larger body and symmetrical body horns.  Each of these guitars came as a Standard, Elite and Ultra.  The Standard did not have any coil splitting functionality as standard, although the pickups in them are still Schaller 4 wire + ground.  They both have a volume and tone for each of the pickups and a 3-way toggle switch - very Gibsonish but with the toggle switch down in the control cavity.

I've had a black Flame Standard for quite a long time and it still has the original wiring and pots, although I did later add a little active "tone enhancing" module (Hollis GX-10) that amplifies it a bit.  There were only a couple of wires that needed to be interrupted and re-routed through this module and I changed the socket to a stereo one to act as the 9v battery switch.  Otherwise the wires from the pickups to the pots is unchanged.  According to the original documentation for the Flame Standard (the official parts list that showed the wiring diagram and values) indicated on the wiring diagram that it had A1meg pots installed and 0.022uF tone capacitors.

More recently I bought a cherry sunburst one in which the pots had been changed to A250K with push-pull pots used for the tone controls to provide coil splitting for each of the pickups.  It looks as though the original capacitors were used though.  Whoever rewired it had done it so full humbucker was in the Out position and split was the In position.  It's hard for me to compare the guitar with the original stock pots and no coil split with the guitar in which the pot values have been changed, because I added the additional module to the stock one, but I'm curious to switch the pots to 1meg with no coil split (as original) and also with 500K pots all round and coil splitting just to see.  I feel that my other stock guitar has more top end sparkle that can be rolled off, but that may just be the additional module at play.

Anyhow,  while I was removing the harness from this guitar I noticed an apparent anomaly with the colours of wires that had been soldered together as the series link and to the switches on the tone pots, so I double checked the wiring diagram on the official parts list.  It was a black and white scan but I've coloured the wires to make them more easily traceable:

On the Neck pickup the Green and Yellow are the series link wires, but on the Bridge pickup the Brown and White are the series link ones.  Those are the wires that had been joined and soldered to the respective switches for the push-pull function.  I have opened my other guitar with the original wiring, and those are definitely the wires that are joined and heatshrunk on each of the pickup cables.  

I found the following diagram for Schaller pickup wire colours in the guitar wiring book by Gerry Hayes that matches the series link wires for the bridge pickup in Fender's original wiring diagram:

Did Schaller make the wire colour designations different on the Bridge and Neck pickups, or would they both be the same and something else funny is going on with where the wires for the pole starts and finishes are connected to the pots?

Am I correct in thinking that connecting the above brown and white series link wires to a push-pull switch is going to drop out the screw coil and leave the slug coil active?

If so, would the yellow and green connected together to the switch as shown in the previous diagram for the neck pickup instead drop out the slug coil and leave the screw coil active?

If that's the case, do you think this was a deliberate choice by Fender?

ICBM

Yes, I think it's a deliberate choice - my guess is that the magnetic polarity of the pickups is also reversed, so in order to keep the two pickups in phase the coils must be reversed too - so the coil splits produce hum cancellation when both pickups are on together. PRS also do this.

You can check the polarity by holding the pickups together face to face - if both screw coils and both slug coils attract each other, the polarity is reversed.

Yes, grounding the brown and white on the bridge pickup, and the yellow and green on the neck, will leave both slug coils on, since yellow remains hot on the bridge and brown remains hot on the neck.

BillDL

Thank you for that explanation @ICBM.   It all began to make a little more sense as I was actually typing my question out.  It was the thinking about it before I fell asleep this morning that was beginning to confuse me and looking at a black and white diagram.  I actually got back out of bed in the early hours and wrote on a Post-It on my computer desk "Check series link colours on other Flame", just so I knew I wasn't going nuts or the Fender diagram was wrong, and then used my incredible image editing skills to do the digital colouring-in job