Hollowbody wiring harness :: Chubbuck Mousa 003

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Here I'm prewiring the electrical harness for Mousa 003.  Being a hollowbody without an access panel, the controls all go in through the treble side f hole.  To keep everything tidy, I prewire the harness as much as possible on a template.  This keeps the leads cleanly routed.  I don't want to look in through the f-hole and see a rat's nest (I see shoddy hollowbody wiring all the time - it looks like shit).  Now that the harness is ready, I can connect the pickup leads to the mini toggle switches, zip tie the wires and install it into the guitar.

The controls are master volume, master tone (both Bourns sealed 500k pots), Switchcraft 3 way toggle, mini toggle for neck series / split / parallel and another mini toggle for phase selection when both Lollar Imperial humbuckers pickups are on.  The tone cap is an Emerson Custom 0.022µf paper in oil.  Vintage style cloth wiring ties everything together.

Check out the video below from the daily vlog for the assembly of this harness.

New tone cap :: 2010 Equator Languedoc copy [5.5 lbs]

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You may remember this one from another blog post where I scratched the shit out of the neck pickup cover ("Being a Professional Means that you Don't Make Excuses").

The hollowbody dropped by the shop recently to swap out the 0.022 mfd mica tone cap for a smaller 0.015 mfd Emerson paper in oil cap.  The player was looking to dial in the tonal sweep a little closer to his likes.  The general rule is that the higher value of the cap, the darker you can cut the tone.  Smaller values do not roll off the tone as deeply.

#eb3mystery complete rewire :: Modded 1970s Gibson EB-3

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The first day back from the long weekend rolls on. Jumping head first into the butchered 1970s Gibson EB-3 mess. Doing my best to get this back as close to stock as you can while dealing with an added 3rd P pickup. I also decided to relocate the previously moved rotary switch back home and add back original controls, so some drilling out of plugs was required. A Curtis Novak choke is going in (original missing), along with Emerson Custom CTS pots. What a mess!

Follow along with this #eb3mystery project here.

New bridge & pots :: Warmoth Strat [8.0 lbs]

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This Warmoth Strat is approximately 30 years old and was tough to play.  The player and I found out that the bridge was vintage spaced and pushed the strings far too close to the edge of the fingerboard.  The solution was to swap it out for a new Callaham V/N bridge.  The "V" stands for vintage mount (6 screws) and the "N" is for narrow spacing.  Wow, what a difference in both playability and sustain.  (note the outer 2 bridge mounting screws were omitted as there must have been a 2 point bridge at some time with two large post holes in the body - we may opt to plug thesein the future).  We also replaced the pots as the old ones were pretty rough.  I used an Emerson Custom 500KA pot for the volume and went with Bourns pots for the tones.  I initially had Emersons in for the tones too but found the sweep far too subtle for most of the pot's travel for this guitar (around 2-3 they began to roll off rather quickly).  The Bill Lawrence bridge pickup's plastic mounting tabs were stripped out so they were plugged and re-tapped.

The pot swap was featured over on the vlog (video below).

Late 60's Gibson Trini Lopez Standard [8.7 lbs] :: refret & bad pots

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Late 60's Gibson Trini Lopez Standard [8.7 lbs] :: refret & bad pots

This guitar had the deepest fingerboard divots I have ever seen.  These divots were addressed along with receiving new frets.  The pots were dirty as well since the "control cavity" is exposed to the elements on hollow guitars.  When attempting to pull the harness to clean it I was surprised to find that the knobs were glued on!  The neck volume pot broke upon removal and the bridge volume was replaced as well due to a bad taper.

Look for a blog post with more details sometime next month.