Here is the final assembly on Mousa 003 which involves installing the pickups, wiring harness, tailpiece and bridge. Stay tuned for a demo video of this guitar in action in the near future.
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wiring harness
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.
![Spotty wiring :: 2005 Epiphone Dot [8.0 lbs]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53dfcee2e4b0c0da377c65c7/1430978182681-RBQE07T8WAVQNECMJTZI/image-asset.jpeg)
Spotty wiring :: 2005 Epiphone Dot [8.0 lbs]
One of the tone pots was not rolling off any treble so that is a sure sign of a broken lead. I pulled the harness and found that the pot did not have a path to ground. Also the output jack was poorly wired, so I clipped and resoldered the connection. Once the circuit was repaired, everything was stuffed back in, tightened up and proceeded with the setup.
<Sigh> just what I thought - someone glued this neck pickup volume knob to the shaft on this '60s Trini (actually, all knobs were glued). Tried heating the knob to release the glue but the glue bond trumped the shaft-to-pot connection. Bummer. Oh well, it's going to be replaced along with the bridge volume pot (volume drops off around 8) with Emerson Custom Pro CTS pots.
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.