Changing pickups in a hollow body

vinnie1971

vinnie1971

New member
Here is a shot taken sliding my iPhone down the f hole of my hollow body.

The stock humbuckers are 3 conductor, White is hot, black is ground and red for coil splits.

I am putting in vintage style 2 hookup with outer braid. So my question is, do the 2 core wires to the tone pots look long enough to allow fishing out the volume pots to do a proper job and desolder old pickups and solder new ones to the pots, or take the short cut and snip the wires ( and hope I never want to use those pickups again - which I probably won't otherwise I would swap them out - they are the ok but nothing special Cort Classic Rocker humbuckers - wound to 8k with Alnico 2 magnets )

c9bd48ecbdb507dfc8be4c581bd05ea4.jpg



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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

Why not just fish out all 4 pots so you can work on them more easily? Putting them back isn't too bad if you tie a string (or wire) around the shaft of the pot and pull the string through the hole to get it back in place, and then you don't have to worry about either of the dilemmas you've mentioned.
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

BriGuy1968 said:
Why not just fish out all 4 pots so you can work on them more easily? Putting them back isn't too bad if you tie a string (or wire) around the shaft of the pot and pull the string through the hole to get it back in place, and then you don't have to worry about either of the dilemmas you've mentioned.
Click to expand...

Goo call, but I f the wire is long enough between the tone and volume pots, I think it'll be less involved just pulling the volumes through. I can use string on the volumes as a fall back, but I can get to the volumes with my fingers through the f holes, just not the tones.

I like the path of least resistance..... although I think they will be 500k as the guitar doesn't sound muddy at all, but
of course if I find the pots are something daft like 250k or 300 k then I will fish them all out.


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Changing pickups in a hollow body

ICTGoober said:
He means the pickup hole - not the F hole.
Click to expand...

My plan was through the f hole as I can get to the volume pots with my fingers. I want to do this with the minimal amount of work.

I saw a video of a guy do it this way and he fed the pots back with his fingers - made it look easy.


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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

It might be easy for you, but I know I've gotten seriously frustrated with this work, and seeing tons of posts about this very thing leads me to believe that it isn't very fun. Take your time, and have good lighting, and plenty of time to do the job. I don't know why they don't build these with magnetic wooden access panels.
 
Changing pickups in a hollow body

Mincer said:
It might be easy for you, but I know I've gotten seriously frustrated with this work, and seeing tons of posts about this very thing leads me to believe that it isn't very fun. Take your time, and have good lighting, and plenty of time to do the job. I don't know why they don't build these with magnetic wooden access panels.
Click to expand...

Yes, I also wish they were made like Lucille with the rear access panel.

It's looks a real PITA! But this guy he made it look easy / he must have have done hundreds. Hence I was thinking, is it cheating to just snip the wires and splice? To me it doesn't seem a tidy job, but then, in the past with a used pickup there wasn't enough cable so I extended it. It's not really any different. But it would bug my OCD...


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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

No, I know of people that just spliced. Maybe it isn't ideal, but if done well it should be fine (if not look fine). As much as I see complaints about this, you'd think someone would have come up with an elegant way to do this.
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

So not at all helpful but you wanna see something cool???

image.jpg
Pretty Gibby with Pearly Gates & custom harness...

image.jpg
Pretty Gibby with Pearly Gates & custom harness that only took me about 15 minutes to install because it has a flipping control plate!!!
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

It's put together a little different than a 335 would be so it lets them do some cool stuff with the CNC mill & it doesn't feedback nearly as much as a typical Semi-Hollow. As I understand it they are made using the same process they use to build their Semi-Hollow L.P.'s which would make sense because it sounds like a mix between a L.P. & a 335/339???

Check out this route! They take just enough to make it easy to work on, & furthermore Gibson actually did something in 2015 that made some kind of f-ing sense!!!
image.jpg
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

Wow, that is cool! What model is that? I am guessing the air chambers aren't nearly as big as on a normal 335.
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

While I wait for my pickups to arrive, I had a dry run using pickup wire for fishing out the bridge volume pot and I had it out and back in again in well under 5 minutes including stripping wire and twining it round the shaft.

I was very happy to find the Cort Yorktown has Alpha 500k pots from the factory so they will be staying. I like Alpha just as much as CTS pots, probably prefer them for linear the taper on tone controls.



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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

I also used these tweezers that came with my adjustable soldering iron:

a264fd370eda9aeadb7dd0c5e3304d25.jpg


They made it very ease to fish out of the f hold and line back up with the hole to go back in again.


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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

Mincer said:
Wow, that is cool! What model is that? I am guessing the air chambers aren't nearly as big as on a normal 335.
Click to expand...

It's a 2015 Midtown Standard & you'd be correct in your assumption...

It's a single carved Mahogany body with a solid center & a flat top instead of center block construction with a pice of Maple molded over it like an arch top. So it's kinda Semi-Hollow/Solid Body Hybrid & the end result is basically what you'd expect. It isn't quite as resonant as a 335 but much more so than a solid body guitar & it doesn't really feedback at louder volumes or under oodles of gain.

Before I dropped in those covered Pearly Gates I had the same uncovered Custom 5/P.G.N. set in it that I have in my L.P. & to be honest when I was pushing a bunch of dirt the biggest difference I found was in the weight? Otherwise they sounded pretty much the same! Obviously the sonic difference was more noticeable while playing clean because it has better acoustic qualities but I mean was playing dropped tuned stuff on it & LOUD without any unwanted noise pretty regularly. The thing just sounded fantastic!!!

In the end they sounded so much alike that I decided that I'd rather have it take on a more traditional Semi-Hollow role & that a more vintage humbucker set might be a better choice? I really liked the way the Pearly Gates Neck performed in it before so moving to P.G. bridge as well was a no brainier ...
 
Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

Nostalgic Distortion said:
It's a 2015 Midtown Standard & you'd be correct in your assumption...

It's a single carved Mahogany body with a solid center & a flat top instead of center block construction with a pice of Maple molded over it like an arch top. So it's kinda Semi-Hollow/Solid Body Hybrid & the end result is basically what you'd expect. It isn't quite as resonant as a 335 but much more so than a solid body guitar & it doesn't really feedback at louder volumes or under oodles of gain.

Before I dropped in those covered Pearly Gates I had the same uncovered Custom 5/P.G.N. set in it that I have in my L.P. & to be honest when I was pushing a bunch of dirt the biggest difference I found was in the weight? Otherwise they sounded pretty much the same! Obviously the sonic difference was more noticeable while playing clean because it has better acoustic qualities but I mean was playing dropped tuned stuff on it & LOUD without any unwanted noise pretty regularly. The thing just sounded fantastic!!!

In the end they sounded so much alike that I decided that I'd rather have it take on a more traditional Semi-Hollow role & that a more vintage humbucker set might be a better choice? I really liked the way the Pearly Gates Neck performed in it before so moving to P.G. bridge as well was a no brainier ...
Click to expand...

That's s fine looking guitar [emoji1360]I bet it sounds even better!


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Re: Changing pickups in a hollow body

Well, a PG is pretty vintage sounding. You could go with a Seth set, and that would be more traditional. It depends what kind of music you end up playing with it.
 
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