Ib5 wiring diagram HELP

[Nik]

Looking for a very clear and very concise wiring diagram for the ib5 bass. Two pickups, two volume and two tone Pots. The pitbull provided wiring diagram in PDF format is incomplete and wrong. It shows one wire coming from the pickup, not 3 (5).

Each pickup has 5 wires . One is black, obviously an earth, so I am happy with that. Each pickup has a pair of wires. Let’s call them red and white and green and white. Red and white are soldered together and green and white are soldered together. One pickup has green and “silver” no insulation and a red and white. The other pickup has red and silver(no insulation) and green and white. One is obviously for volume, and one is for tone.

Could someone please provide clear instructions on which pair is for volume, and which one is for tone?

Following that, provide clear instructions on what pairs get soldered to which posts on the pots?

Thanks in advance. During this process I will document and photograph the procedure and create a post with clear photos for others to follow so they haven’t got to tear their hair out like I currently am. I work on soldering single strand copper wires to legs on USB drive memory chips for data recovery , so I am not afraid of a soldering iron. Aggravates me when I don’t know what wire goes where.

Cheers.

[Simon Barden]

It's not really 'wrong', as the kit suppliers keep changing pickup sources and some are single wire + screen and some are 4-wire + screen. It was 100% correct at some point. What is really needed now is to have on them are both variants shown.

There are also plenty of replies on the forum as to how to connect up the pickups, and whilst it's not got a particularly useful search engine, a bit of looking should have given you the answer you require. It has been done before.

But here it is. The extra wires are not for tone controls. The humbucking pickups have two coils, and each coil has two ends of the coil wire that need connecting. On the pickups you have in the kit, those four ends are brought out down the cable, and in addition, they are protected by an overall braid screen, which is also connected to the pickup baseplate. The four connections allow for the pickup to be wired with the coils in series, the coils in parallel or for a coil split for single coil operation.

The 'silver' is the braid cable screen. This will always need to be connected to a ground

You say 'red and white are soldered together and green and white are soldered together' , which would make red and white and green all soldered together which doesn't make sense, though if they are, then some pics of the cable ends would help here.

The standard PBG pickup 4-wire connections are:

Black - signal hot
Green+screen - signal ground
Red+White - wires that connect the two pickup coils together internally. Leave unconnected and tape up the bare ends to avoid them shorting out. If you want a coil split, then this red/white combo is connected to an extra 2-way switch that can connect the wires to ground.

So the black normally goes to the volume pot connection as shown in the PBG wring diagram, the green and (bare wire) screen get soldered to the back of a pot and the red and white wires remain unconnected (and as mentioned, need to be insulated to prevent unintentional grounding and single coil operation).

In a single wire + screen connection, the red and white wires are connected together within the pickup itself, (so it can only be used as a humbucker). In the same way, the green and screen are connected together within the pickup, so only the braided screen needs bringing out, surrounding the black 'hot' signal wire.

Different pickup manufacturers have different wiring colour conventions, so whilst almost all use red, green, white, black + screen cables for their '4-wire' pickups (as its a standard mass-produced multicore colour combination, so cheap and common to buy), the uses of those colours are swapped around (e.g which colour is the hot signal), which is why you will find multiple pickup wiring conversion charts around on the web. Only the braid screen is the same in all cases.

So have a look at your cables again and you should be able to sort out black for the signal hot, Black for the signal hot connection, green+screen for the signal ground, and leave the red+white pair unconnected but the end insulated with tape or heat-shrink.

Hope that helps.

[JimC]

If I understand you correctly the two pickups are wired differently. This could be just different batches, or it could be an error. As you sound experienced with electronics you could probably do a bench test to check this given a decent meter, but I'm not the best person to give the details. It's principally polarity that might be an issue. You can probably find instructions on the Web to check humbucker polarity, or will someone who's done it comment.

[Nik]

It's not really 'wrong', as the kit suppliers keep changing pickup sources and some are single wire + screen and some are 4-wire + screen. It was 100% correct at some point. What is really needed now is to have on them are both variants shown.

There are also plenty of relies on the forum as to how to connect up the pickups, and whilst it's not got a particularly useful search engine, a bit of looking should have given you the answer you require. It has been done before.

But here it is. The extra wires are not for tone controls. The humbucking pickups have two coils, and each coil has two ends of the coil wire that need connecting. On the pickups you have in the kit, those four ends are brought out down the cable, and in addition, they are protected by an overall braid screen, which is also connected to the pickup baseplate. The four connections allow for the pickup to be wired with the coils in series, the coils in parallel or for a coil split for single coil operation.

The 'silver' is the braid cable screen. This will always need to be connected to a ground

You say 'red and white are soldered together and green and white are soldered together' , which would make red and white and green all soldered together which doesn't make sense, though if they are, then some pics of the cable ends would help here.

The standard PBG pickup 4-wire connections are:

Black - signal hot
Green+screen - signal ground
Red+White - wires that connect the two pickup coils together internally. Leave unconnected and tape up the bare ends to avoid them shorting out. If you want a coil split, then this red/white combo is connected to an extra 2-way switch that can connect the wires to ground.

So the black normally goes to the volume pot connection as shown in the PBG wring diagram, the green and (bare wire) screen get soldered to the back of a pot and the red and white wires remain unconnected (and as mentioned, need to be insulated to prevent unintentional grounding and single coil operation).

In a single wire + screen connection, the red and white wires are connected together within the pickup itself, (so it can only be used as a humbucker). In the same way, the green and screen are connected together within the pickup, so only the braided screen needs bringing out, surrounding the black 'hot' signal wire.

Different pickup manufacturers have different wiring colour conventions, so whilst almost all use red, green, white, black + screen cables for their '4-wire' pickups (as its a standard mass-produced multicore colour combination, so cheap and common to buy), the uses of those colours are swapped around (e.g which colour is the hot signal), which is why you will find multiple pickup wiring conversion charts around on the web. Only the braid screen is the same in all cases.

So have a look at your cables again and you should be able to sort out black for the signal hot, Black for the signal hot connection, green+screen for the signal ground, and leave the red+white pair unconnected but the end insulated with tape or heat-shrink.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the reply. I had had a couple of “shandies” and posted in a bit of a rage. My ib5 is quite old, I picked it up a couple of years before pit bull pulled the old stains. Mine is the “dark tease” colour and has been in the box covered in cabinet maker’s wax while life got in the way. COVID lockdown enabled me to almost complete it. I grabbed some heat shrink from work today so I’ll insulate the wires that aren’t connected. Haven’t done a build diary for this one, but will cobble it together when I a chance. Thanks for both your replies.I’m posting on my phone and can’t appear to upload photos of the pickups I took earlier this evening. I’ll post some pics shortly when the phone uploads to iCloud. Damn iOS and Linux don’t play nicely. Thanks guys, much appreciated.

[Simon Barden]

No problem. We've all done it. I know I have.

For the site to host pics, they need to be less than 1500 pixels on the longest side and just a bit less than 1meg in size. You can get free picture resizing apps for your phone, but of you use Tapatalk to access the forum form your phone, then that should also offer resizing on the fly (or so I'm led to believe as I don't use it).