#51 Solar A2.7 & Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow & 5-way install

Local guitarist buddy time again (owner of the Fortin Grind and the Warwick bass amp featured here previously) - after taking several swings at it, he got fed up and let me have a go at installing a brand new set of Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow pickups into his Solar A2.7 guitar. Complete with some custom switching and whatnot, to take full advantage of the entire feature set the pickups offer.

For the benefit of all parties involved, as well as in the interest of time, i'll spare you the gory details of the "before", and zoom straight to the "clean slate" stage. We have two 25K log potentiometers with built-in push-pull DPDT switches, the stock 5-way blade-switch, the pickups themselves and the output jack.

Here's where things get interesting - the 5-position blade switch (for the pickup selection) seems to have four independent sections, but which move simultaneously, via the shaft carrying the "common" contacts. It's gonna take a bit of "tap-dancing" to figure out how get things hooked up correctly to this, but with patience, determination and perseverance, it'll get done, one way or another. This shall not be the day that a feeble switch defeats me!..

Right then, back to the real world, and the task at hand. The install instructions are somewhat extensive, although only two wiring examples, neither of which applies in this case. But no matter, we shall soldier on. The more... challenging, let's call it, part will be reconciling the descriptions of all the features (which are quite the mouthful, as it were), the "to do"-list, and the physical connections.

I've been instructed towards the following: pickup selector position 1 - Bridge; 2 - Bridge HFT; 3 - Both; 4 - Neck HFT; 5 - Neck; Volume pull - Modern/vintage (ie. Voice 1/2); Tone pull - Coil split (ie. Voice 3).

The four "5-pin" things are the blade switch sections as viewed from the back of the guitar (neck towards the left)

Well, turned out to be not quite as traumatic as i thought it might be. The sets of three commoned pins for the bridge & neck pickups were already made, so that helped point me in the right direction. We're even left with one whole section of the 5-way switch unused. With the "battle plan" in place, onwards to the practical realization of it. First thing's first - further clean-up of the puzzle pieces. And while i have them out, might as well solder on some grounding wires for all the metal casings.

There we go - solder blobs reduced, made 100% sure the potentiometer casings and the switch casings, despite being factory-crimped together, make definite electrical contact; ran local jumpers from the switch poles due-to-be-grounded to their respective switch casings; grounded the blade-switch mounting-plate. Next, removing the pickups to hook up the wires going to the HFT section of the pickup selector switch.

Fun part - the neck pickup mounting screws seem to have gotten jammed inside the threaded bushings that were press-fit into the holes in the PCB (which are the baseplate of the pickups). Bushings which were spinning loose - that's no good. They're getting soldered in, just to make sure. Bridge pickup screws came out as normally as one could expect. 

Then again, considering these are direct-mounted (as opposed to on the underside of so-called "pickup rings", or of a pickguard that carries all the electronics), these bushings shouldn't have (needed to be) threaded in the first place... Yyyyyeah, on second thought, out they come. Otherwise there's no real pickup height adjustment possible, in this usage scenario.

There, HFT wiring in place. And now, "keyhole surgery", part one - threading the HFT wiring through the channels already populated with the rest of the pickup wires. But nothing that can't be done. "Keyhole surgery", part two - squeezing in the mounting screws pretty much blind. But that's done too. Now on to the "fun" stuff - soldering up all the stuff...

In the interest of sanity, i trimmed the excess lengths of wire (in the case of the bridge pickup) to the shorter of the available two, and grouped and twisted each relevant set together. Well, sanity, minimizing chaos and keeping easier track of things in these tight quarters. As it turns out, the neck HFT wire came out maaaybe a few mm (1/4", if that) too short, buuuut eh... We'll make it work. In goes the blade switch, then.

Since the shield from the pickup cables needed to be grounded, and with the volume pot's casing being somewhat of a "star ground", i didn't want to leave the signal wire unshielded (by having to to "peel off" the shielding on whatever length was necessary), so i just tacked on an extra piece of wire, to span the gap. Hence the heatshrink visible in there.

Pots and switches wired up as well. I took the liberty of trying to tuck in the wires out of the way, to make some room in the middle for the battery. Not that i'm patting myself back, but the twisted pairs did quite help with that task, and aided in the end-result not looking like a total rats' nest.

Buuuut some testing revealed a bit of a "brainfart" - i managed to reverse the bridge and the neck pickups on the switch. I guess the "back to front" layout of the switches threw me off and i didn't catch it in time. Don't worry, the wiring diagram screenshot above containts the correct(ed) version. No big deal, the back of the switch with all the solder tags is accessible enough. Of course, the HFT wires need to be swapped as well. But with all that done, time to tune up this baby and confirm that everything works as intented.

Voice 3 switching works, quite noticeably; the HFT thing might be really subtle, it doesn't "feel" / sound all that obvious at least on the single-note open strings (i don't play guitar myself, "by the way"). Voice 1/2 switching is quite obvious as well, and all else seems fine; time to call it a day.