Monday, 26 September 2011

Replacing the Traveler Speedster guitar pickup

For all you Traveler Speedster guitar owners that are thinking about replacing the pickup I have created this blog to share my experience. My Speedster is the newer model with the dual rail humbucker pickup. The earlier models had a single coil pickup. I've replaced the dual rail pickup with a Seymour Duncan SL59-1 Little 59 Strat  Bridge Pickup and installed a miniature toggle switch allowing series and parallel configuration.

Here's the wiring of the original dual rail pickup. Note that the original pickup is wired in series.


The Seymour Duncan Little 59 can be wired in Series/Parallel using a DPDT mini-toggle switch. The wiring diagram for this configuration and the alternative Series only configuration can be downloaded from the Seymour Duncan support web site at http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/
Note that Seymour Duncan has a different colour coding of pickup wires than the original pickup.

In the following picture you can see the mini-toggle switch installed and partially wired up. The pots have not been replaced and measure 500K.


Here's the Little 59 pickup attached to the metal surround.


The lower panel is attached to the body by 2 screws and has a cavity allowing the bridge earth wire and pickup wires through to the controls.



 Finally a picture with all the connections wired up.



I drilled the hole for the mini-toggle too close to the tone pot. I'd suggest you position it closer to the jack socket.


I bought my Speedster from http://www.playawayguitars.com

If you'd like to see some of my other guitars visit http://www.guitars4you.com

The sound of the little 59 is a bit more crisp and even across the frequency range compared to the original dual rail pickup. However it is not a big difference in my opinion. The dual rail has a resistance of 11.7K compared to the 14K of the Seymour Duncan when wired in series making the little 59 somewhat hotter!

When the little 59 is switched to parallel it gives an almost Fender Telecaster reminiscent kind of sound.