Humbucker wiring issues

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone would be able to help with a problem I've come across when transferring a humbucker between guitars.

The pickup in question is a Jackson passive humbucker which was fitted to my old 2 single coil, 1 humbucker strat style guitar that uses 5-way switching with 5 solder points on the side of the mechanism.

I wanted to put this into the bridge position point on my Ibanez rg270(2humbucker, 1 single coil), which is 5-way but with 8 solder points.

I noticed that when comparing the Ibanez pickup to th Jackson the Ibanez had 3 leads (bare wire, white, red), however the Jackson only had (bare wire & white!), my thoughts on this were to treat the white/red previously connected to my pickup selector as one and solder them together to the single white from the Jackson, then attached the earth to 1st pot.

The results, no earthing problems, tone & volume pots fine, but a very single coil sound coming from my humbucker!, more concerning though, no sound from the mid/bridge setting on the pickup selector! I went back in and removed the connection from the 6th point on my pickup selector so that the white lead from the Jackson is now only attached to the 1st solderpoint on the pickup selector which allows me all positions however the sound is still single coil!


..so finally to my question, is there a specialist method of wiring this pickup to obtain the full humbucker sound from only two wires coming out of my humbucker?
Or rather could it be that these are effectively white and red and there is no earth? sounds strange i know but if anyone has any ideas or would be able to direct me to a source for a likely answer i would be very appreciative!

Thanks for having the patience to get so far reading this essay too!

Stef :rolleyes:

If you have a meter or a continuity tester, you can suss out the connections.

I'm not familiar with the Ibanez wiring, but I suspect that you have tied the 'hot' lead of your Jackson pickup to something that should not be there.

Most 3-wire humbuckers have the 'hot' lead from one coil, the 'return' lead from the other coil, and a Ground lead that only connects to the frame of the pickup. The Ibanez may be a different beast altogether, possibly bringing the inter-coil connection out on one of the wires, and the switching circuit may need to be modified a bit to accommodate a standard 2-wire humbucker.

If you can get an Ohm-meter, it can really help you make sense of this. Without a schematic of the original circuit, you will have to carefully trace everything out for yourself. The one advantage to this is that you will gain a better understanding of the circuit.