Coil tapping a pro mod, how easy?

[Harmonious]

I've got a San Dimas 1 2H, absolutely love it. I would really like to have a single coil option on the pups though, and wondered how easy they are to coil tap? I'm not sure I have the confidence to attempt it myself, so any idea what a good guitar tech would charge? Thanks for any help, and apologies if this has already been done on another thread.

[dg]

A coil-split mod is very simple. It's just a matter of taking the two pickup wires that are normally soldered together (the red & white on the Duncans in your SD) and soldering both of them to one lug of a switch. Wire the other lug of the switch to ground. When you flip the switch, you ground one of the coils and get the signal from just the other coil. Here is the Duncan diagram for wiring both pickups to a DPDT push-pull volume pot to use it as your coil-split switch. The push/pull pot saves you the trouble of having to drill & install a new toggle:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=2h_1v_3w_pp

I'm not sure whether the neck pickup ('59, right?) is splittable on your guitar. Some '59s are, but most that I've seen are not. In that case, you can still split the bridge hum as above. Someone here will know if they used splittable neck pickups, or you can just look in the control cavity to see if it has 4 conductors.

It shouldn't be too expensive to have a tech do the work, but then again I'm in the U.S., and I keep reading about crazy high prices for basic tech services in Europe, so I don't know what you'd be looking at in England.

[MakeAJazzNoiseHere]

Pretty sure they all have the 4-conductor '59's. Both of mine did, anyway.

OP, take your cavity cover off. If one of your pickup's wires has what looks like braided metal wire on the outside instead of black insulation, then it's a 2-conductor pickup.

[DonP]

Can do it with my eyes closed

I've coil taped my Les Pauls, my SL2H, my 750XL, ...I'm a coil tapping freak, but I rarely use the tapped pickups. WTF? Tapped pickups and crushing metal just don't get along

In fact, just last night I was playing my Classic with the 496R/500T combo, and it sounded like dog shit, so I set it down and played my other LP. Then as I was looking at it, Doah! the bridge tone pot was pulled to tap. I slap it down and hurray! It sounded great again.