It was long overdue, as so far I had had to swap pickups on a bunch of different guitars every time I wanted to test a new design, which can be a pain in the *ss depending on how tinker-friendly a given model is (hear that, Jazzmaster pickguard?)
I wanted the pickups to be adjustable axially as well as vertically, and a way to test different pot values. Here is what I ended up doing :
I built everything from offcuts and leftovers. I whipped up a bog-standard, 25.5" scale neck with an ugly-grained rosewood fretboard and a not-so-pretty maple blank I had lying around in my workshop. The body is mahogany from an old shelf glued over a piece of cherry wood. Before the glue-up, I routed a channel that went between the bridge posts and into the control cavity. I then routed a bunch of pickup cavities onto a walnut neck blank that had a slight twist in it, chopped them into small blocks, and routed a swimming pool into the body that would automatically center them with the strings. For ease of installation, I routed off the lower section of the guitar and 'recreated' the missing wood with a piece of maple. Said piece of maple can be secured to the body with two thumbwheel screws going into two threaded inserts. The friction keeps the pickup blocks in place when it is screwed in.
For the electronics, I went with the simplest system I could think of to emulate the most common pot values. The two 1meg pots are connected to two On/Off/On switches that add one of two resistors in parallel between the hot lug and ground. Values are 1 megaohm and 333 k ohms, so that the resulting resistance is either 500k or 250k. With the switches in the middle position, the pots stay at their 1 meg value.
I had originally planned to use a screw-on terminal block set into the channel, but it turned out to be hard to maneuver the wires down there so I ended up going with two small Wago snap-on connectors to connect the pickups to the electronics.
(one is missing here, I had to borrow it for another project)
I would have added an output wire and an On/On/On switch to test the pickups in parallel, but I like being able to wire the pickups in series easily.
On top of being a tool I badly needed as a pickup maker, it is a lot of fun to use. How does a Tele bridge pickup sound in the neck position? No problem. What does the parallel position sound like with a Jazzmaster bridge pickup and a Gold Foil in the neck? Lemme check. I have actually taken it to gigs as my spare guitar.
