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.

Intonation out of whack :: 2011 Fender Pawn Shop '51 [7.6 lbs]

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Yikes! The intonation on this Fender Pawn Shop 51 is way out of whack. In the photo above I adjusted the high e to it's proper location. Note that the high e is set roughly at the scale length (25.5"). The rest of the saddles all need to fall behind this one. The player is into jazz so no wonder his chords sounded so out of tune, even for jazz!

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The main reason this ended up on my bench though was for a missing output jack nut.  Since this guitar was made in Japan, the threads on the jack are metric.  I could not find a metric nut in my parts cabinet so we decided to install a much more robust Switchcraft jack along with a serrated washer to help keep it tightly mounted.

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Replace jack :: Alvarez Kazuo Yairi MMY1 [5.0 lbs]

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A Monte Montgomery signature model Kazou Yairi Alvarez back in the shop with some output jack issues.  At a recent gig this player was experiencing his signal dropping out which is never a good thing.  I opted to replace the corroded jack since it was worn out and the solder joints were sub par.

Jack too big :: Forrest b-bender tele

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The quality of machining on the B-bender components are incredible on this tele but the player was having difficulties plugging into the jack.  The contact on the jack is rather large and was being pushed up against the body when a cable was inserted.  I ended up swapping out the budget output jack for a Switchcraft and now the cable inserts with ease.  The original jack was metric so I had to change out the electrosocket mount as well.

Epiphone Sheraton II [8.1 lbs] :: Lollar, Emerson, Bourns complete upgrade

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This circa 1990's Epiphone Sheraton II was stripped down and built back up with premium components.  The original lifeless dark-toned pickups were swapped for Lollar Imperial low-wind humbuckers.  The new wiring harness consists of Bourns 500K Premium Series sealed pots, Emerson Custom 0.022 µf paper-in-oil caps and a Switchcraft 3-way switch and output jack.  Even the tuners were replaced with 18:1 Grover Rotomatics which installed without modification.  A new unbleached bone nut and setup for DR Pure Blues 11-50 strings round out the upgrades.