I have an RG550 (an '87) that I love, and recently decided to start working on refurbishing it with new electronics. I'm currently waiting on an Air Norton neck, Cruiser mid (neck version), and Evo bridge to arrive. I'm working on coming up with some fun wiring options, but I wanted to ask the smarties here what the heck do you do with a humbucker in the middle position like the Cruiser? Do these things actually sound at all good when coil split? Is it ok to use them non-split combined with one coil from the neck or bridge, or would that be a noisy mess?

I would use an additional switch to split all the coils so that you would have 10 combinations, 5 with single coils and 5 with humbuckers, you don't really want to mix them due to the difference in output.

Interesting. So you're saying combining a coil of the cruiser with a coil from one of the other two pickups would be strange, since the cruiser is so much lower output?

I hadn't fully appreciated just how mismatched that cruiser is to the pair of hot humbuckers you've specced, you'll have trouble with positions 2 & 4 no matter how you wire it.

You should probably not split the cruiser to start with and simply wire it as standard to see how it sounds. You really needed a hotter middle pickup to work better with the other two.

Yeah, I'll give that a shot to see how it sounds. I was mainly a little worried about hum in positions 2 and 4. Thanks for your response!

You'll still get hum as soon as you split the humbuckers because once they're split they errr, don't buck hum any more.

Yes. I guess it helps