No pickup, new nut & tuner fix :: 1993 Gibson J-100 xtra [4.6 lbs]

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A made in Montana Gibson jumbo in for a few things.  Originally it came in for the pickup to be removed and for the bridge pins to be better fit.  The pickup was a Barcus Berry bridge plate pickup that was fairly easy to remove.  The adhesive had deteriorated so it peeled off cleanly.  The output jack in the tail block was replaced by a NoJak.  These are sized to fit an enlarged end pin hole with a collet and allen screw tightened from the inside.  It's a good solution to plugging and redrilling the tail block, but always seems to require quite a bit of fitting.

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While addressing the pickup removal, I noticed that the Gibson Deluxe tuners were damaged so I attempted to repair them.

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During the setup I discovered that the nut was too worn out with excessive open string buzzes.  We went with a new bone nut and shimmed up the saddle to round out the setup.  Check out the shaping of the new bone nut below in the video from the daily vlog.

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Tuners & feedback :: 2012 Epiphone Casino NA [6.4 lbs]

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A good customer brought his new-to-him Casino in for a little work.  We swapped out the tuners for Grover Sta-Tite open back tuners.  The mounting holes on the back lined up, but I had to play around with the bushings.  Normally with press-in bushing tuners, I keep the original bushing in the headstock and install the new tuners.  The issue was that the Grover tuner posts were a hair too large to fit the bushings.  So you would think that I could just swap out the original bushings for the Grover ones, right?  Nope.  The Grover bushings were too small to stay in the headstock so I had to remove the original bushings, ream out the inside diameter of the bushings and re-install.  Ah the joys of modding import guitars: replacing metric components with mis-matched imperial unit hardware.

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The player was also having feedback issues with the full hollow / P90 design of the Casino.  An inexpensive fix was to stuff black foam inside the f-holes to help reduce the sensitivity of the body.  Oddly enough, the foam I used was from my stash of foam that Stewmac uses to package Waverly tuners.

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2002 Gibson ES-333 [8.4 lbs] :: intermittent pickup & broken tuners

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2002 Gibson ES-333 [8.4 lbs] :: intermittent pickup & broken tuners

The neck pickup was cutting in and out on this hollowbody so that usually means you have fish the electronics out through the f-hole or pickup rout to clean / repair.  To my surprise I found an access cover in the back!  This is the first Gibson hollowbody with an access panel to come across my bench. As much as I don't like the idea of them on hollows, it makes resoldering this broken neck pickup lead and cleaning the pots much, much easier.  The bass-side tuners were also previously repaired by someone supergluing the covers.  This is always a temporary fix and the time had come to replace them.  Tuning is now much more stable with a new set of tuners.

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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.

1966 Vox Bobcat [4.9 lbs] :: missing tuners ... and everything else

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1966 Vox Bobcat [4.9 lbs] :: missing tuners ... and everything else

This 3 pickup 335-style guitar is a "husk-only" project (no parts). The owner was initially looking to restore this guitar but is working out a deal to trade for a Vox Lynx body (same guitar, 2 pickups).   We decided to just install new tuners at this time.  Glad to find that Grover Sta-Tite tuners install with no major modifications required other than slight reaming to fit the press-in bushings on the face and tightening the fit of the mounting screws.  

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