Rickenbacker 325 type diy build

[Robchorz]

Hello

I am new to diy guitar building.  I bought my first kit, a Rickenbacker 325 style guitar.  The kit did not come with instructions on wiring.  Can anyone send me a diagram of how a 3 humbucking pickup guitar should be wired. As much detail as possible, since I may have difficulty understanding wiring.  I see red, black and yellow wires.  Not sure what each means.  Currently, input jack in unsoldered and pickups are unsoldered.  The rest is soldered.  Two of my pickups have yellow wires.  One has a red wire.  There are two pots with green capacitors, and two without.  I assume some are volume and some are tone? Which ones?  Please let me know if you can help.

robert

[Bizman62]

Hi and welcome!

I'm not an expert by any means when it comes to electric circuits but here's what I can tell:

To start understanding any guitar wiring, the very basic is that it's a loop going from hot to ground - actually your amp is part of that loop but let's keep this inside the guitar. So, the hot wire of a pickup is connected to the tip lug of the jack, the ground wire to the sleeve lug. Inside the pickup the wire is wound thousands of times around a magnet but it's all continuous so the hot wire makes a spin inside the pickup and comes back to the other lug of the jack. Simple, isn't it? The pots work similarly, sort of. The signal wire goes in and comes out and there's continuity inside the pot. The switch simply "cuts" an unwanted pickup off the loop. 

The colouring of the pickup wires isn't standardized but since yours came as a kit I suppose the blacks are for ground. There's ways to check that but I can't tell how.

The pots with capacitors are for tone. Caps cut treble and combined with a pot you can adjust how much treble will be cut off. All pots can be used for adjusting volume and with a capacitor you can choose which frequencies will be reduced more.

Google is your friend, I could find some Ricky 325 related diagrams that look like pictures of the real gear. The pickup manufacturers also have wiring diagrams, look for "3 humbucker 2 tone 2 volume" or something like that. There's several ways to use that combination depending on what you're after. It might also be that there's one volume and one master volume.

Hopefully this helped a little, most likely someone more savvy will chime in pretty soon.