I just performed a little surgery on my guitar and wanted to share the results which might eventually be useful to someone else.

The problem with my electric guitar: it’s old and cheap, the 5 position switch (used to select combinations of the three pickups) was acting up, as were the three potentiometers (volume and two tone knobs). By acting up, I mean they were adding noise, cutting in and out and generally being pains. In addition, I can’t stand where the volume knob sits as I’m touching it half the time when palm muting (causing yet more unwanted noise).

I had purchased a replacement Fender 5-way pickup selector switch (Fender part #099-1367-000), standard fare on most strat type guitars, but was hesitant to actually open the instrument up. However, tonight was more annoying than ever so I opened it up. A peak inside revealed that it was a big mess of wire with gobs of solder everywhere.

Call me barbaric but I decided to cut the crap and hook the pickups directly to the output–volume be damned, I’m always at 10 anyway, and the tone pots needed replacement. So I had a look at this very informative page about the 5-way switch and went to work.

My solution involved simply tying the ground leads from all three pickups together (black wires, in my case), along with the cable out ground and a nice little wire tied to the guitar’s bridge. Then I took other lead from the neck, middle and bridge pickups and tied them to positions N-A, M-A, and B-A as shown on the guitarnuts graphic at the bottom of the page. Finally, the common terminal was tied to the other cable out wire.

Done and done. Testing it was a breeze, just plug the guitar in and scrape a quarter against the pickups as you play with the switch. The guitar works great, without any noise or cutting out and the volume nicely maxed out. Huzzah.