Support / Fender Telecaster Wiring Diagram & Fitting Instructions
Fitting Instructions
The good news is Telecaster’s are one of the more simple guitars to replace the wiring harness, because the harness is located to a removable control plate, which can be removed and worked on with ease.
Removal
- Find somewhere safe, dry and secure to place your Telecaster guitar while you work on it.
- Undo the 2 x screws that hold control plate to the body.
- Carefully lift the control plate up and cut all wires from the body to the control plate closest to the pots where they are soldered. These are a couple ground wires (normally black in colour).
- Cut the 2 pickup ground wires from the pots, at the pot leaving the wires as long as possible.
- Cut the 2 pickup hot wires from the switch, at the switch leaving the wires as long as possible.
- Cut the 2 x wires coming from the jack socket hole.
- Put the guitar safely out the way for the time being.
Replacement
- Working on the control plate, you should now be able to remove the 2 old pots and switch.
- At this point you may want to clean the front of control plate where the old pots have been.
- You will need to check the size of the holes for the pots as on some control plates they are drilled small for cheap electrical components. If they are small, the best way to enlarge them to 10mm to fit CTS pots, is to use a round file.
- The control plate is now ready to fit the new harness.
- From here everything is in reverse using the wiring diagram below.
- Fit the new wiring harness into the control plate.
- Solder the 2 pickup hot wires to the new 3 way switch (refer to wiring diagram).
- Solder the ground leads to the volume pot. (refer to wiring diagram).
- Solder the 2 x ground pickup wires to the back of the new volume pot (refer to wiring diagram).
- The control plate is now ready to go back into the guitar, just we need to sort the jack socket out first.
- Remove the old jack socket and feed the new Jack socket through into place and tighten the nut.
- Fit the control plate into position, but don’t screw it down yet.
Testing
- Plug the guitar into an amp and with something small and metal you should get a response from the pickups by gently tapping the pickup poles/posts. – Or you may have a Multimeter!
- If Everything is working, screw the control plate into place.
Tools & Equipment
- Philips (Cross head) Screwdriver.
- Flat headed screwdriver on some models
- Small adjustable spanner/wrench.
- Good quality soldering iron.
- Wire Cutters.
- Masking tape for keeping things in place or out the way while working.
Tips
- When soldering the wires to the back of a pot, do not overheat / cook the pot.
- Keep wires tidy and neat and make sure all components are grounded.
