Free-Way 3 way/6way switch on ASAT Classic

[Joelorigo]

I am thinking of adding the Free-Way 3 way/6 way switch to my 99 ASAT Classic. The 3B3-01

https://www.freewayswitch.com/products/

Does anyone have any experience installing this? Is there any reason it won’t fit in an ASAT?

[cdm]

I'm in the process if doing this myself, were you able to get it wired correctly, i'm not exactly sure how to wire the neck pickup.

[Joelorigo]

I didn't do it. Yet.

I put one in a Strat and I wired another with the PTB system. Then got distracted by other things.

You've looked at the diagram I assume?

[cdm]

Hi,

It wound up being fairly straight forward, I had one connection in the wrong place but got it figured out. I had submitted a question with Free-Way but didn't wait for their response before wiring. Mine was a asat blues classec guitar center deal of the day and I was upgrading the bridge pickup to an MFD pickup as well. I wired the guitar per response 1 (see below).

Love the extra tones, I found a used semi hollow tribute for a good deal that has a seymour duncar pearly gates humbucker and am going to add the switch in that one as welll (using method 2 below).

This is response I got from Free-way:

Firstly you could wire the pickups as per scheme B007 (even though the neck pickup is a humbucker). This would give you the six pickup selections shown in the diagram, but with the neck humbucker rather than the neck single coil. This would offer you series/series-out-of-phase/parallel-out-of-phase combinations on top of the conventional 3 positions. You would need a neck humbucker with a separate chassis ground wire to do this.

Secondly, you could wire the pickups as per scheme B009 which is a coil-splitting scheme. Your bridge pickup is a single coil of course, so you would omit the finish wire pair from that pickup (as it does not exist in your case) but this will give you the same pickup selection (bridge pickup on it's own) in positions 1 & 4. Other than that the remaining positions will be different. You would need a 4-conductor neck pickup to enable coil-splitting as shown.

[Joelorigo]

That's great! Yeah I like the extra options on the Strat that I put the Free Way switch in.

Oh, so the guitar you put it in was an ASAT Classic? Did the Free Way switch fit ok in there. It looked like it was going to be tight when I was looking into it. I was even looking at a different control plate that had the switch in the center of the 2 knobs.

[cdm]

Yes fit perfect in a Tribute Classic Bluesboy!

[cdm]

I've got a switch to put in a tribute legacy, was there anything that stuck out to you or was it pretty straight forward with the PTB system?

[Joelorigo]

Yes fit perfect in a Tribute Classic Bluesboy!

Good to know thanks!

[Joelorigo]

I've got a switch to put in a tribute legacy, was there anything that stuck out to you or was it pretty straight forward with the PTB system?

I wired one Strat with PTB and another one with the FreeWay switch. I am a total beginner at modding guitars so off the top of my head I can't say about doing both mods to one guitar. I had to do a lot of research bot both and ask questions on another forum to do the PTB wiring. Good luck!

[cdm]

A non g&l strat? Got it.

I'm pretty new to modding myself as well. I've put the deaf eddie chromecaster on a few strats, that's worth checking out if you haven't heard of it before, similar to the free switch with a few extra tonal variations and is a rotary knob with 4 different positions (http://deaf-eddie.net/)

[Joelorigo]

Yes, I did the PTB to an old Japanese Squier and the FreeWay switch to an American Standard.

I will check out the deaf Eddie chromecaster, never heard of that.