The Epic Re-Wiring of a Epiphone Les Paul Special II

All right epic is probably a bit much, how about we just settle for a titanic battle between myself and a medusa-like collection of wires in a constricted battlefield. Well in the end I was victorious, and I can bring you the story with some pictures!

First I pulled all the old stuff out of the guitar:

Then I shielded it with conductive copper tape:

I think the shielding was actually the funnest part of this whole project. The stuff is cheap ($10 for 10ft of 3" wide) and flexible and super thin. You can pile it 4 or 5 layers deep in places to get it to do what you want and it doesn't take any extra room.

This first part was all done in about 5 hours of one night, maybe even not that long.

After that the wiring started. Remember I was taking this from a simple 1 tone 1 volume toggle factory setup to a 2 push/pull pot with full separated ground setup done by a rookie. If I have one word of advice on this, don't make your first project one where you are trying to stuff 3x the intended number of wire into a very tight space.

Here's what it looks like before I started:

Here's what it looked like when i was done:

And actually I added at least one wire after this picture was taken. i didn't quite realize how many more wires you would end up using when you don't just ground everything to the pots.

I started by pre-wiring as much of it as possible outside of the cavity, that's everything but connecting the pickups in this case. I got it all in and plugged it in and HUM!!! Except when I pulled out the switch of the volume pot, then i got some fairly clean signal. From their it was a looonnggg process of basically re-doing everything until i found the problems, which turned out to be every connection. Some of them 3x.

The list of things I fixed and learned between a lot of hum and working guitar were:

1. Everything gets grounded
2. Don't ground the pickups to the body if you have only one ground wire, ground it to the output, even if nobody seems to tell you this anywhere
3. Ground the output to the body with a wire, don't rely on the copper shielding, even if that works for the pot bodies.
4. Butt connectors and ring terminals are your friends
5. Soldering to an output jack sucks
6. Re-use the pickup bezels that came with the guitar, even if the new ones look like an exact match, they probably don't
7. Meter the pickups if they are 4 or 5 wire humbuckers so you know exactly what you are dealing with. I found out that the bridge pickup ground was actually coming off the north coil instead of the south. It's easy to do and you'll know exactly which wire is which.

The last step to making work was actually point 3 above. I actually got it to the point where it was pretty much working properly except the tone knob, in that when you turned it down it increased it turned up the hum!

The only complaint I have now is that when i hook it up to my toneport and use a lot of distortion splitting the bridge pickup results in an unusable amount of hum. I don't think there is anything I can do about this though, as it's not a problem with lower setting of distortion or through an amp.

The pickups themselves don't really sound that much different from what was in there originally, though the sound does seem "crisper". It definitely seems louder now though. The biggest change is the tone knob now actually does something, 0-10 there is a noticeable effect. This is the first guitar I have ever owned where I can say that. I think this is a function of using A500K pots and not the B500K that came with the guitar, not the pickups. Maybe the capacitor. I'll have to see when I work on the Peavey if I notice something similar.

A post comparing the sound before and after will follow.

In the end I'm very happy with the result, and I learned a lot, and it looks and sounds exactly like I wanted it too.