matiac Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 As some of you may know, I have a 2004 Elitist Les Paul in Honeyburst that I absolutely LOVE, but like all Epiphones, has those amber control knobs. Not being able to leave anything alone, I decided to swap them out for a set of gold witch hat knobs with silver inserts I have, along with some "thumbcutter" washers for that vintage look. Anyway, I removed the knobs using the tried and trusted rag method, and when I did that, the neck volume/tone pots tops parted company with the rest of the control. All either would do after that is just spin and spin, and would actually still work, but you had to pull the knob up. Needless to say the whole harness got replaced with CTS 500K Volume, and 1133 for tone with .020 caps. Putting the whole thing together was actually pretty easy, as I was a little intimidated when I had everything out and ready to be assembled. That all went together without a hitch, so I figured I'd swap out the stock pickups for a set of open coil jobs I was going to use for a kit guitar that never came to fruition, custom made for me by Mick at www.manliusguitar.com, called "Landmark PAF" in cream with gold set screws, made to PAF spec, i.e., tweed covered wire, period correct coil wire, 2 lead wire, piece of maple below the bobbins and used Stew-Mac's schematic for a '50's setup. My first attempt at ANYTHING like this took a total of 6 hours to do, my guy would have charged at least 100 bucks to do this for me, so I saved on that. The only hairy part for me was having to drill the holes for the bigger diameter pot shafts that come through the top, but that also went off without a hitch. So I put everything together, brought it in, plugged it up, put the Digitech (RP250) on "Blues", and Oh. My. GOD!! It's a whole 'nother guitar now! WAY brighter sounding than the stock 50SR/60ST pickups, but at the same time...for lack of a better term, "throaty"...VERY nice tone, clean, as well as dirty. It's basically the tone I've been chasing since I first heard Jimmy Page all those years ago. Speaking of that, I didn't do any of that coil splitting malarkey, it's all to 1950's spec. I'll post some before/after pics as soon as I can find my SD card for my cellphone... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kidblast Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 well ya know what they say -- no guts, no glory! I can dig it, Pickup swaps are the easiest way to make one guitar something else entirely. When I've done these mods, I've rarely had to re-bore any holes.. I guess that's the only way tho if you are adding parts that just wont jive with the Imports for sizes and such. A little daunting to take a drill to something like this, but, nice to hear that it all went well! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matiac Posted July 30, 2014 Author Share Posted July 30, 2014 Yup, so now the only thing I haven't, and won't mess with is anything to do with the neck. MAYBE file fret edges and such, not that this particular guitar needs it, frets are actually pretty fresh looking for a 10 year old guitar, also have an aluminum tail, and a Gotoh Bridge, but I don't think either one will go, as they're SAE, and not metric. Also took the kidney bean tuner knobs off in favor of metal tulips, and that looks so much better, not that I have a problem with kidney bean tuners, just not on every single Epiphone I've ever owned except one. So yet again, I've taken a guitar, and made it my own, and it sounds so much nicer now...is kinda neat how that sort of thing completely transforms a guitar, and here I thought I couldn't do it, but my R.C. Aircraft experience has gotten my soldering skills to the point where it was do-able, and it really wasn't that difficult... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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