Initial wire harness

The YouTube video then had another brilliant idea. You mount all the wiring on a harness made out of cable ties meaning that you have a relatively strong but flexible support framework which stops you pulling on the wire core or solder joints.

Mid progress wiring harness

This harness gradually gets more complicated as you add more wires and more components. I didn’t get a wiring diagram with the kit – just a bag of components – so I had to do a bit of research and there are a lot of different approaches to this. Eventually I found a diagram that matched the collection of components I had.

Wiring harness in place

After a lot of soldering and a lot of trips up and down stairs to the amp to check if things were working I ended up with this:

All the components on a flexible cable-tie harness outside the body but all sitting in the right place above their corresponding holes.

Next step is to tie them all to strings and feed them into place – but that’s for another time.

Tracing of component layout and f-hole

On to the wiring. My other guitar is a Les Paul which has a handy hatch in the back. You take out 4 screws and the back of all the knobs is revealed. A 335 is a bit different. The back doesn’t open.

Having spent some time on YouTube I found a few videos explaining how I was going to have to do all the wiring outside the guitar and then poke it through the f-hole and somehow get the knobs to come back out through the various holes.

Step 1 was making a template by drawing the location of the holes and the f-holes.

Components in shoe box

Having done that you mount it on the inside of a shoebox lid, make some holes in the right places and poke the components in from the top. Then what you have is the front of the guitar inside the shoebox lid and the terminals of all the components in the open on the top of the shoebox where you can get at them.