valrus wrote: Mon Feb 20, 2023 8:22 pm
Paging @mmmguitar, who said in my intro thread they'd be happy to help when I finally got around to this.
Edit: Third revision of this post, due to brain farts.
I first replied with a guide which presumed that the Free-Way is a "shorting" switch (achieves splitting by sending NT and BT connections to ground via the GD contact). Then I convinced myself it was a 2 pole non-shorting switch which wouldn't tap the Alumitone; and rewrote everything with alternative diagraming relayed via text. Then I looked AGAIN, and realized that the first way makes more sense, even with the 10 contact selections. If you have a multimeter, checking for continuity between the NT+GD and BT+GD connections in switch positions 6,7,9, and 10 will confirm that it's a shorting switch. But I'm fairly certain it is.
Here's my original post; should that prove the case:
Yep! The short answer is that you can adapt the Alumitone to the Freeway switch diagram by soldering the white wire to the BT contact. You can solder the green and striped wires to a grounding point permanently, without worrying about toggling between the white and striped wires as Lace's diagram specifies.
In case you brought it up because you were wondering: The two holes through each contact's solder pad are so you can solder in jumper wires between contacts, or thread a single bare wire through both of them for the sake of holding the wire in place while you solder to the pad (if you so wish - The wire needs only be soldered to the pad; with the holes as an option if you find it's a three-handed job).
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The more technical explanation is that Lace is omitting a helpful bit of info from their diagram: The Alumitone doesn't actually require switching between which of the striped and white wires are grounded. You can have the striped and green wires grounded at all times, then add the white wire to ground when you want the "split" sound (the Alumitone humbucker is actually a novel kind of offset coil pickup (similar to a P bass pickup), with a "tap" wire decreasing its inductance when grounded). The reason Lace shows a toggle switching between the striped and white wires is because they're redundant to one another for function of grounding the pickup - But so are the start and series connection wires when you split a humbucker.
For what it's worth: I briefly had a HSH set of Alumitones in a guitar, and my experience was that the "split" sound of the Alumitone "humbucker" was about on par with cutting 3db from the signal. The humbucker-sized Alumitone is essentially the same pickup as the single-sized one, but with a relatively greater inductance resulting from the increased amount of aluminum in the larger housing. For people who want to regulate relative output between positions, the tap wire is there to help the humbucker-sized model drop to around the same output as the single-sized model - But if you're combining the Alumitone with any typical pickup (which you are, in this case), the effect may prove more subtle than in a typical split humbucker+middle single coil arrangement.
Let me know if you want me to clarify anything. Also: Don't be surprised if you wire everything up and find that some of the combinations in the ten switch positions are out of phase. You're kind of playing mad scientist with this setup. Have you decided whether you want position 3 to be split neck+tapped Alumitone, instead of the humbuckers in parallel?
), what I think I'd like to do is this (mad scientist hair intensifies):
