Our customer Daniel wanted to customize and hot rod his Tele Thinline.
The guitar came with a black pickguard, Les Paul style wiring, and Fender's version of P90 single coils. We sourced a paisley pickguard blank and then had our friends at Pickguard Heaven cut the outline (cheaper for the customer since P/G Heaven has the templates and tooling to do this work with less labor involved.) We then custom routed the body and pickguard to fit Daniel's Custom Shop Strat pickups. Next we used one of our favorite wiring mods. We use a 5 way super switch and a push/push pot to achieve a very versatile sounding guitar. This mod allows you to maintain all of your usual five strat sounds, and get two series/humbucker sounds. When the switch is in the second position (neck and middle pups in parallel) and you engage the push/push switch, it connects the neck and middle pickups in series, turning the two single coils into one humbucker! The same thing happens in the fourth position. By just pushing down on the tone knob you can connect the middle and bridge pickups in series making them a humbucker. The series connection boosts the output and lowers the resonant peak of the pickups giving a fatter, darker, louder tone. Obviously we did lots of custom work on this guitar, but on a stock strat this wiring is achieved without altering the stock appearance of the guitar. We love it!
Locating and routing the pickguard for single coils and controls.
The connections
The result