swappable pickups projects

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
I've been wanting to try and make it easy to swap pickups back and forth in a couple of guitars, which basically means finding some kind of connector that is reliable and easy to add to the harness and to the pickups both.
I originally thought about using audio connectors like GFS's "kwickplug" connectors but they can get expensive, are pretty bulky for us in a guitar cavity, and I wasn't 100% sold on the mechanical reliability.

After looking around, I found model car and airplane enthusiasts are just as worried about signal integrity as we guitar players are (in a battery powered airplane the batteries are small to cut weight, so you don't want any losses due to bad connectors).
Their application is much more mechanically demanding (vibration in a model airplane vs a guitar), so I started looking at connectors and decided the WD12212 was a good match for 2 wires (they also have a 3 or 4 wire option)
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Also, the GFS system has the disconnect at the pickup itself. It is probably the most convenient, but if you change your mind later, want to sell the pickup, etc... you now have sort leads and need to resolder leads on.
so I decide to put the breakout point as far from the pickup as possible (in the control cavity in a tele or LP for example). This is another reason to keep the connector tiny.

So I grabbed my monoprice strat, remove the pickups and installed the GFS strat sized Gold Foils I bought a while back and never go to. This is what each pickup connection looks like (I later used a silver marker to mark each connector with N, M or B to identify which connector goes to which pickup.


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The connection feel good and secure, and once the connectors are put on, it's a breeze to change them.

Of course a strat is easy, there are no long "tunnels" to route wires through, so my next step will be to do my Monoprice LP style guitar, even though I don't have any better pickups to swap into at this time.
 

PapaBear

Guit Fiddlier
The ones I've seen for Strats had every thing wired and a connector going to just the jack and you swapped the whole assembly
 

TwoNotesSolo

Student Of The Blues
It's definitely a solution for strats, especially for "swimming pool" routed bodies that will also accommodate humbuckers and other oversize pickups.
In fact if you are swapping humbuckers you probably need different pot values, etc... which makes sense to have them attached to the pickguard.
You just have to buy multiple pickguards, sets of pots and switches, etc... so it gets expensive. Since my goal was not to swap before each gig or whatever, my solution allows me to try out different pickups at any time (my wife doesn't like me to whip out the soldering iron on the kitchen table before dinner, so I often find myself not tinkering because of lack of setup. I'm hoping this alleviates that).
 

kkann

Blues Newbie
I just bought a wired kit for my Strat project from Obsidian Wire. All of the wire connections are solderless. You just push down on top of the gray connector with a small screwdriver shown below, stick the wire in, and release. That's it. Maybe you could find one of those.

st-modern-vintage-front-3.jpg
 

kkann

Blues Newbie
I was just referring to the locking wire connector that Obsidian Wire uses not their whole product.
 
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