Thursday, March 16, 2006

DiMarzio is Wrong!

As I explained in my previous post, there was one final headache involved in completing this project, and it is DiMarzio's fault. Please take a look at the 2 illustrations, and keep in mind I am no technical writer.

The red box in Fig. 1 is an area I would like to bring your attention to and more specifically, to where the bridge pickup connects to the 5 way switch and volume pot.

Fig. 2 is a "blow up" of this area. The problem with DiMarzio's schematic is that the red and green wires are reversed. I have indicated the "reversed" wires with blue arrows.

If this is wired up per DiMarzio's instructions, the bridge pickup will not work at all. I suspected something was wrong with DiMarzio's diagram and my suspicions were confirmed when I had an electronics guy check it out for me.

Connected per DiMarzio's instructions, the bridge pickup will not work with the 5-way switch in either position 4 or 5.

To correctly wire this up, the green wire goes to the 5-way switch and red wire is grounded to the volume pot housing. The "ass-backwards" red and green wires threw me off and caused a lot of experimenting where none was needed had the schematic been correct.

I am considering writing a letter to DiMarzio regarding this incorrect schematic. Maybe I can save some other chump out there some aggravation.

Crispy

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice story man!!! I have a blue squier stagemaster and i have plans to buy two dimarzios humbukers. I really love my stagemaster and I prefer to improve her for a better sound than lay her off.

Crispy said...

My Stagemaster is still my preferred axe. If you use my blog as sort of a tutorial when you give your a makeover, you won't be sorry.