New wacky wiring harness inbound.

[cassius987]

Just thought I'd post in about my latest forthcoming tinkerings. Since I've had my 4003/5 for a while now, I have figured out what I like the most and the least about the HB-1s in each position, wired series, parallel or single coil with RWRP. Further I have some fun ideas about extra functions for the tone controls. Add to that the fact that the original wiring harness has a few failing joints in it (it's just mad I tinker with it all the time, the big baby) and my lack of desire to hunt them down and repair them, and it's time for a new harness. Here's what it's going to be:

1. 500K DPDT pots (the old kind RIC used) for each control. So every pot is also a DPDT switch. The high resistance should play nice with the HB-1s.
2. The hard-wired tone caps are going to be 0.022 µF, not 0.047 µF.
3. Each volume pot's switch will toggle between series humbucking and either the bridge coil (neck pickup) or neck coil (bridge pickup), which gives RWRP noise canceling in the middle position. This is actually how it has been hard wired for a few weeks and it's my favorite setting (and my notoriously picky wife's favorite too), but I do like how the series humbucking configuration sounds in certain mixes. Parallel is nice but I don't find it very useful when single coil is an option, and the HB-1s have a fabulous single coil tone. I think my wiring scheme for this is pretty similar to how Dane does it but I'm not certain.
4. The bridge pickup tone pot switch works like the one found in all 4003s that bypasses an in-line cap, except my wiring method will be a little different from RIC's and the capacitor will be 0.01 µF, not 0.0047 µF, to let a bit more signal get through.
5. The neck pickup tone pot switch... at first I was going to use it to bypass an in-line resistor on the neck pickup like the Roscoe Beck bass, but I don't find myself using it much. Instead I'm going to make this a "dub" switch. I'm going to use it as a bypass for a second tone cap wired in parallel to the neck pickup tone pot (which should have an effect on both pickups in mono mode, but will be isolated if I'm using ROS). This second tone cap will be 0.033 µF, so the final value adds up to 0.055 µF which should be pretty dark. When the control is rolled all the way down it should be pretty dang thumpy. I'm thinking this will go good for my current project where sometimes all you want is a low bass rumble and nothing more; after that gets recorded and looped back I would then toggle the switch and be back in the normal tone range.
6. The selector switch and ROS jacks will be stock.

In addition it's getting the standard shielding job I give all of the favorites in my stable. I'll take some pics while I'm in there and try to share clips some time as well.

[johnhall]

... at first I was going to use it to bypass an in-line resistor on the neck pickup like the Roscoe Beck bass . . .

. . . and the RIC 3000 and 2000 Series.

[cassius987]

Oh, that's right. But I was always confused about what that was supposed to do since there was just one pickup. In the RB's case, it knocks the neck pickup down a peg without changing the tone (the way rolling the volume back does), so the bridge pickup pops a little more. Yet another way of achieving pretty much the same thing.