the Fly Clone Project

@ClydeCrashcup, your bridge/middle selector position seems to be out of phase. If there is 60hz noise as well, then swap the start and finish wires of the bridge humbucker. If it’s out of phase but humcancelling, then leave the wiring as it is and flip the bridge humbucker’s magnet.

@mmmguitar, thanks. This is my first experience wiring a guitar so I'm still getting up to speed.
Yes, there is still 60 cycle hum in position 2, so let me give you all the details of how it is wired.
The black wires coming from the single coil DiMarzios are wired to ground on the volume pot.
The DiMarzio humbucker is wired with green connected to the shielding of the cable coming out of the pickup. [it was soldered that way when I got the pickups in bag with the gutted guitar] That is then connected to the ground on the Mag volume pot.
One side of the 5 position switch is dedicated to sending the various singles and pairs of pickups to the sweep which is this hot going to the volume and tone pots.
So position one sends the red wire from the humbucker to vol and tone, and position two sends that plus the hot from the middle pickup. The black and white coming out of the humbucker are soldered together and they are connected to the other side of the 5 way so that when it is in position two that lead is grounded. This cuts out the bar nearest the bridge so only the bar nearer to the middle pickup is active.
Does this sound like it is wired properly?
How do I "flip the bridge humbucker's magnet?" as it seems that is what is needed...
Thanks,
Clyde

@ClydeCrashcup, if the split bridge+middle position is out of phase and has 60 cycle hum, then you’ll swap what the green and red wires of the Dimarzio humbucker are soldered to:

1. unsolder the red wire from the selector switch
2. separate the green wire from the bare (ground) wire and solder it to the selector switch where the red was
3. Solder the red wire to the bare wire and make sure they’re both grounded.

This will swap which coil of the humbucker is active when splitting - If the coil currently being used is out of phase with the middle coil, then the other humbucker coil will be in phase.

There are other ways of dealing with this (depending on which humbucker coil you prefer to be active when splitting) but, for now, swapping the two main humbucker wires is the simplest.

You only need to flip a magnet if the pickups are humcancelling, but out of phase. It doesn’t sound like you need to do that, but here’s a video, for reference:

Thanks @mmmguitar,
Next week I will make the wiring changes you described and see how it comes out.
Is there any rule of thumb as to how much space I should have between the pickups and the strings?

It’s a matter of preference. You’ll know when a pickup is too close to the strings because it will cause warbling artifacts and potentially affect intonation. Otherwise, if it sounds good; it’s good.

@mmguitar
I spent some time recently looking at all the Nitefly wiring diagrams I could find and noticed that when there are single coils involved that they all have white going to ground. I was going on what I read on the DiMarzion website that said that black is always ground on their single coils. That's why I wired mine with black to ground. Doh!
So I pulled my white leads off the switch and grounded them and pulled the black leads from ground and ran them to the switch. Seems to be doing what is expected now. All 5 positions on the switch are working fine.

Glad to hear you finally got the switch doing what you want. Any other gremlins under the hood?

@mmguitar
There are two, maybe 3 final bits that could or should be done. First is the fact that someone cut the nut slots too low. Especially the D and G. So I jerry rigged a temporary 0 fret using a piece of wire. Made it playable. Intonation could be off a hair and I'm not sure if it's too high at the nut now or not but it's just a piece of wire jammed up against the nut that is being held down by the strings. The 12th fret seems like it might be a bit higher than 11 and 13. I wonder if it came off and got glued back on poorly. Last thing is cosmetic. Someone did a really bad job of cutting a second jack hole in the body. It's not even round, and the screw that holds one end of the real jack is mostly hanging in the breeze now. I'm hoping some day to be able to make the hole round and glue a wooden plug in. They even nicked the end of the plate the real jack is mounted in when they tried to freehand the hole with some power tool. But, as of now it plays great and sounds great. It's a much better guitar than someone with my limited ability should be playing and I feel myself lucky to have stumbled on it.