Rewiring the Telecaster

Been almost a year since my last post - not much has changed since then. Haven't had much time to play or acquire new gear, but once thing had been bugging me for a while.

My MIM Telecaster had issues with the tone knob not working ever since I put in the new pickups (SM-2N Mini-Humbucker in Neck, and Hot Lead Stack - STK-T2b in the Bridge Position). I basically fried the tone knob with some super bad soldering.

The switching mechanism I had was basically a setup that switched between Series and Parallel when using the middle position (both Pickups) by using a Push/Push Potentiometer (so no trying to pull up on the knob which was nice). I liked this because the switch was still very intuitive (Neck, Both, Bridge Pickups) and only when in the Middle Position would toggling the Push/Push Pot have any effect. Originally I had this wired to the rear (TONE) Pot, and the volume used a regular pot.

 
While I wanted to keep the Series/Parallel switching, I also found that the Hot Lead Stack could be wired in 'Power Boost' Mode which boosted the output, but you would lose the hum-cancelling. I figured 2x Push/Push Potentiometers would do the trick to support both options and allow me to keep my 3-way Switch since I wasn't a big fan of the 4 way switch as is commonly used for the Series/Parallel switch.

Since I now had a specific switch option for the rear pickup I wanted that one to be under the rear Tone Knob, and I'd move the Series/Parallel switch to under the front volume knob. First I had to figure out the schematic. After some doodling on a Seymour Duncan layout I came up with the following:

My Modified Wiring Schematic for Series/Parallel & Bridge-Boost

The Volume pot shows the Series/Parallel switch and the Tone pot shows the Boost Wiring.
This in theory gives me several distinct options:

1. Neck
2. Neck + Bridge (Series)
3. Neck + Bridge (Parallel)
4. Neck + Bridge Boosted (Series)
5. Neck + Bridge Boosted (Parallel)
6. Bridge
7. Bridge Boosted

After this I started the soldering process to get everything hooked up. Once I got both potentiometers in I did a test fit and came to horrible realization: The control cavity on this MIM Telecaster had a 'hump' in the middle between both Potentiometers. This is not a problem with normal sized pots, but the switching kind, which are much taller, simply would not fit! I whipped out the Dremel and went to work to cut out that section.

The bump removed!

After I was satisfied everything would fit , it was time to wire up the maze of wiring. This took a little bit of time but turned out alright as you can see below.

 Wiring Complete

While it it was a little crowded now in the control cavity everything slid right in and I was able to close it up with any issues.

As far as how it sounds, you can definitely tell the boost is there for the bridge pickups, and series parallel works great too (and my tone knob works again too!). When starting to combine everything (e.g. parallel + Boost) it seems the bridge drowns out the neck pickup and almost sounds like the bridge boosted by itself. But that still leaves me with about 6 unique different sounds I can now get out of the guitar so I'd consider this a success!