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Author
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Topic: Magnatone Lyric D8 wiring
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Kevin Ruddell
Member From: Toledo Ohio USA
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posted 09 September 2004 02:54 AM
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I'm rewiring my Magnatone D8 as the toggle and tone switch don't function properly. I'm not sure if this was a factory goofup or if a previous owner did this. There are very thin wires coming from each neck through the channel the pickup wiring follows although they aren't connected to the pickup,pots or output jack . They are tied to the screw attached to the bottom of the bridge and are probably an earth ground. Are they grounded to the back of a pot ? One of them was stuck underneath the pickup cover.Any help is appreciated.thank you [This message was edited by Kevin Ruddell on 09 September 2004 at 02:55 PM.] |
Paul Arntson
Member From: Bothell ,WA (just outside Seattle)
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posted 12 September 2004 11:07 PM
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Hi Kevin. I've been away, or I would have answered sooner. My Lyric also has switch problems and I've been meaning to get to the bottom of it. When I get a chance to take mine apart and analyze what's goin on I will give you a reply.
-paul |
Kevin Ruddell
Member From: Toledo Ohio USA
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posted 14 September 2004 03:03 AM
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I just mailed the pickups to Jerry Wallace for rewinding yesterday after speaking to him on the phone. The pup that sounded good was at 4,000 ohms and the one that sounded weak was at 0 ohms ! The thin metal wires terminate around the screw attaching the bridges to the body. I'm guessing the other end was connected to a ground somewhere on the bottom of the control plate. I'll solder new ones to the back of the tone pot for ground. I'm going to look underneath my Fender D8 control plate to see how Fender wired their electronics to get an idea of how the Magnatone should be wired. It looked like someone had added new wires to the weaker pup in the past and hooked it up incorrectly to the toggle switch. |
Al Sato
Member From: Texas Hill Country
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posted 14 September 2004 09:17 PM
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I also have a Lyric D8 and I'm not sure how the toggle is supposed to function. I think it's supposed to be as follows: if you point the toggle toward one pickup or the other, you should get that pickup but not the other. The center position should be both or neither. Am I close? As it is, the switch gives me either the near pickup or both pickups.Thanks. |
Paul Arntson
Member From: Bothell ,WA (just outside Seattle)
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posted 27 September 2004 09:28 PM
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Hi again, Kevin and Al,I pulled my D8 apart and traced the wiring.
Here is the wiring: http://home1.gte.net/parntson/magd8b.jpg Correction: In the schematic, the capacitor should have gone to the bottom of the tone pot instead of the top. The pictorial shows it the right way. oops. Sorry about the lo-res grafix.
Mine looks like this was the factory wiring. Green wire for ground, red for signal, and masking tape on the solder joints. Pickup leads are brown, and ground is a super skinny bare wire. I wouldn't suggest wiring it this way if you are re-doing it. There are much better ways to do it. What they have done is to put both necks in series in the "both" position, and then short out the pickup which you don't want to hear. This saved having to install a more expensive switch. If the switch weren't making good internal contact it would give the effect of not killing one neck. Also, the 20K resistor does not look like it does much. It might have been a safety factor to protect the pickups against a tube amp input with a bad cap, which might allow DC to flow through the coils. I'm not sure. Maybe Rick A. can shed some light on why they would wire it this way.
Anyway, that's what I found inside mine. The switch is a Single Pole 3 position center OFF type. Still available and not too expensive. If I were re-doing mine, I would lose the 20K resistor and maybe go with a better switch, perhaps a DP3T and see what the center position sounded like with the pickups in parallel instead. It might lose a little treble, though.
Good luck.
-paul[This message was edited by Paul Arntson on 27 September 2004 at 09:34 PM.] |
Paul Arntson
Member From: Bothell ,WA (just outside Seattle)
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posted 27 September 2004 09:32 PM
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Al - According to what I found, the problem with yours is caused by the selector switch not making contact on one side, and thus not shorting out the near pickup like it was supposed to. Mine was doing the same thing, then I joggled it a bunch and it started working. This is a weird kind of backwards way to switch pickups.
-paul |
Blake Hawkins
Member From: Land O'Lakes, Florida
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posted 28 September 2004 02:30 AM
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Paul, perhaps I can provide some possible reasons for the wiring you found in your Magnatone.Shorting out an unused audio source is a way to turn it on and off without pops and hum.
It is a common way of wiring microphone switches. The 20K resistor could be to even out the tonal charastics of the pickups at low volume levels by providing a high impedence load.
Note that the way the volume control is wired, (and Fender used that too.) the load on the pickup is constantly changing depending on the volume level.
The resistor prevents the pickup from having a very low load at low volume levels. Blake[This message was edited by Blake Hawkins on 28 September 2004 at 02:32 AM.] |
Al Sato
Member From: Texas Hill Country
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posted 28 September 2004 08:28 AM
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Thanks, Paul. I'll try to jog the switch into working again. Thanks for all the information. |
Kevin Ruddell
Member From: Toledo Ohio USA
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posted 28 September 2004 03:19 PM
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Thanks for all the responses everyone . I also noticed that jiggling the toggle switch back and forth caused some intermittent action on the pickups function.I bought a Gibson three way toggle switch to replace the original one. The wiring is as described in the previous post in respect to color coding although there is not red wiring. |
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