Recently a Raven hollow body guitar came into the shop to have the pickups replaced. The guitar is a classic hollow body and access to the pickups is through the f-holes on the sides. In addition, when the pickups are removed, the pickup cavities provide additional access to the components.
The new pickups are a pair of Retrotron humbucking pickups.
The pickups are accessible after removing the 4 rim screws from the guitar. The screws are marked to replace them back in the same pickup and same holes. Some screws are different lengths and putting them back in the same place is important.
The next step is to loosen the nut from the switch. The switch can be pulled through the pickup opening. This switch is a sealed switch with lugs for the pickups. The body of the switch is the ground. I mark the lugs to indicate the one for the neck pickup and the one for the bridge pickup. This step makes wiring the pickups easier and correctly.
In order to remove the ground leads from the switch, I heat the connection with a soldering iron and use a copper braid to absorb the excess solder. This makes a nice clean surface to work with.
Humbucking pickups come with various wiring schemes. This one has (from top to bottom in the picture) a positive lead, a ground, a negative lead and two leads for “tapping” the pickup. In the replacement of the pickups, the two leads for tapping will be soldered together. They will not be used on this guitar.
It is important to cover the soldered wires with shrinkable tubing to prevent them from touch a grounding surface in the guitar. The shrink tubing is heated and molded to the wires.
All the lead wires are connected to the switch. As you can see, the negative and ground leads are soldered to the side of the switch. The “tapping” leads are secured to the wire bundle with another piece of shrink tubing. This keeps the wires from flopping around inside the guitar and causing noise.
Once the pickups are connected, the guitar is re-assembled. Here are the new pickups on the guitar. The strings will be installed on the guitar and the guitar is ready to play.