Looks as good as new!
May I ask what you used to get the pickup pole pieces so shiny?
Looks as good as new!
May I ask what you used to get the pickup pole pieces so shiny?
Just some metal polish and a good rub.
That looks just the way an SG ought to. Nice save!
I have the exact same make, model and year guitar. I bought it used in ~1982
My mods have been very minor: Les Trem ii vibrato, Golden Age roller bridge, Grover locking tuners and a custom bell cap to match the 5-ply pick guard. Do you think it's worth it to upgrade the pots?
Nice guitar!
The general effect of the 300k (volume) and 100k (tone) pots is to make the guitar sound a lot duller than you'd normally expect. The tone pot probably has the most effect as that's like turning a 500k tone pot with a liner taper down to 2. Certainly changing the tone pot for a 500k audio taper pot would give you a brighter, clearer sound, and you'd still have the ability to roll off some treble with the tone pot. Swapping the 300K volume pots for 500k audio pots would also add a bit more brightness and move the resonant peak up a bit, but it would be a less noticeable change than the tone pot.
If you want to be able to return the guitar back to close to the original state, and you have kept all the original parts to do so, then I'd replace the whole wiring harness (excluding the pickups), only unsoldering what you have to of the original harness.
Thanks, Simon. Sounds likes it's worth a try to change the pots. I have to wonder why Gibson chose to use the lower resistance pots on this model. Was it purely a cost cutting measure? If so, how much could they possibly saved by this?
Great job. You are definitely a craftsman Simon.
I have no idea. As you say, there's no cost reason to do so. Maybe it was a Les Paul influence to give the guitars a warmer jazzier sound, or maybe their buyer messed up and bought a whole load of the wrong pots they couldn't return so felt compelled to use them. I don't know what the T-top bridge pickup sounded like, but web reports seemed to indicate that it was quite thin sounding (just found one sound clip and it does sound thin and bright) so maybe the pots were selected to give it a bit more bass than 500k pots would do. All I know is that the neck T-top sounded really nice with 500k pots.Originally Posted by TZK321
I just called Gibson customer service and had a nice chat with fellow. Unfortunately he wasn't a whole lot of help. He said that at the time this guitar was made Gibson was part of a conglomerate and that building guitars was not a high priority so it might be a quality issue. No records were kept regarding these kinds of decisions. He also said that it might have something to do with the capacitors that were used with those pots.
He also said that he'd never heard of a 100K tone pot on a Gibson. His exact words were "That's weird."
It was a weird time!
I measured both pots with a meter once they were out of the body and disconnected from anything else. They both measured just over 100k, just like both volume pots measured 300k.
The capacitors were cheap ceramic disc types of 0.020uF (as opposed to the now more common 0.022uF), so no need for a different pot value.
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