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I bought some '57 classic humbuckers off of e-bay for my Epi Sheraton II, and suddenly reality has reared it's ugly head. I've never done this sort of thing before. I started to remove the old pickups and got as far as the wire cutting point and stopped there. I have one wire coming out of each pickup - blue for the bridge, red for the neck. The blue wire runs into a black and white wire about ten inches from the pickup. The red appears to run on down to the volume and or tone control for the neck (this is a semi-hollow body so it's kinda tough seeing much beyond that). So, I'm thinking: detach the bridge pickup at the junction with the white and black wires, track down the red wire for the neck pickup and detach/desolder. Sounds simple enough, however, if anyone could screw this up, it would be me. Any and all suggestions are welcome and would be greatly appreciated. And yes, I recognize the question is a bit moronic, but what the hell, ya gotta start somewhere.

There are 2 ways you can do this.

The first way is what you are now considering which is to cut the leads on the stock pickups and splice the new pickups into the exsisting wire. The up side to this method is that you'll save a pretty big headache by not trying to remove the pots and switch from the guitar. The downside is that in order to do this you'll want to leave as much wire inside the guitar as possible, leaving your stock pickups with fairly short leads. This isn't a huge deal because you can always add wire to the stock pickups if you want to install them in something else but it is worth considering. Just make sure to leave enough wire in the original pickups to easily solder to at a later date.

The other method is to use fishing line and tie a piece of line to each pot and the switch after you remove the mounting nuts. You can then pull the electronics out to the pickup mounting holes, solder the new pickups directly to the pot terminals and chassis and by pulling the fishing line, get the pot stems back out of the top of the guitar. Trust me, this is a lot more work than splicing but it is a more professional way to go.

From the tone of your post I'm guessing you don't do a lot of work on guitars so splicing is probably going to be far less frustrating.

All pickups have at least 2 connections to make, a hot and a ground. On the 57 Classics the hot is the stranded wire covered by the black insulator and the ground is the braided sheilding. The braid is not only for sheilding the hot lead from RF interference but it is also your ground path for the coils and baseplate. Make sure you can determine the hot and ground connections in the exsisting wiring. If the Epi pickups also have braided sheilding it will probably be easier to use a seperate wire soldered to both pickups braid to connect the two instead of trying to solder the 2 braids directly to each other.

Make sure to wrap the hot connections with electrical tape or shrink tubing to protect against shorting the hots to ground.

I think I will end up taking the frustrating, pain in the ass approach. I plan to hang on to this guitar, and I might as well get to know all its innards. The '57's won't be here for another few days, so I have a bit of prep time. I will most likely get back to you, once I get down to the actual work, if that's okay with you.