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| The Job - The owner of this lovely Epiphone® Les Paul brought this beauty in for pickup replacement and an N-Tune installation. |
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| It's not everyday that you get to work on such a nice flamed top. Here we're removing the knobs with a soft cloth. |
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| The stock pickups are removed and the wiring harness is brought out to the surface. Proper assessment and planning is absolutely neccessary from here on. |
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| The candidates; DiMarzio® 36th Anniversary PAF and Seymour Duncan® Jazz Model. |
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| Sorting out the N-Tune true bypass switching and wiring in the pickups. |
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| It's quite a hassle when you can't work away from the body because of the tail-piece ground wire. |
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The reason why you need to plan your work when working with semi-hollows is because you can't afford to mess up anywhere or you'll get really frustrated
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the taking in-and-out or apart just to start over. Or worse still, breaking a connection somewhere in the middle that makes debugging extremely painful! |
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Thankfully access is quite manageable with this guitar as we didn't have to use a string to thread the components through the holes.
Putting the potentiometers back in after rewiring - tweezers and some elbow greese will suffice. |
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| We made sure that the components hanging out of the cavities were constantly on a cloth to protect the top from any potential scratches. |
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| The pain-in-the-a** part; working through the F-holes. We all know what that F means. Haha! |
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| The cilent chose to go with the vintage cream cover to match the existing hardware on his guitar. |
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| Now to tuck away all the messy wiring nicely and away from view. |
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| Quick check to test whether the electronics are working fine. We got a spot on "A" at 440HZ! |
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It was a lucky thing that this guitar didn't have a centre block and we decided to mount the battery clip plus holder below the neck pickup.
Doing so would hide the wires from view. We cut the battery clip away so we could extend the wires. |
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| Here you can see the extended wires and a new battery clip. |
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We hid the battery underneath the neck pickups so that the wires can't be seen through the F-holes.
A fairly convenient place to open up when it's time to change batteries too. |
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| Clean and neat! The wires are hidden from view. |
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| Re-assembling all the parts back into the guitar. |
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| One more check to make sure the N-Tune works fine. Spot on "A" at 440HZ again! |
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| Job well done! |
