Gibson Chet Atkins Country Gent wiring restoration – opinions and advice please

paganskins

I have an early Gibson Country Gent in excellent condition but the electrics have been buggered about with, it's just like the one @ESchap had/has but with a bit less gold plating left:



I was hoping for some advice and opinions before having it re-wired.

It should be master vol on lower bout and volume, volume, master tone however it currently has a piezo bridge (Mike Christian, Graphtech Ghost precursor) with a preamp and 9v squeezed in somehow accessed by removing the bridge pickup 

Controls currently are mag volume and tone, piezo volume and piezo/mag blend. Also it has separate coil taps for each humbucker.

So all the active stuff has to come out and I will be going back to the original control layout but considering originality and resale do I:

1. Keep the coil taps?
2. Keep the Mike Christian bridge but just wired passively to the stereo jack?

The bridge has graph tech saddles which work well with the bigsby, I do have the original bridge but would need to source a replacement saddle.

Does anyone have any idea on the pot and resister types and values it would have had originally? Perhaps one for the Gibson forum.

And finally any recommendations for a tech to do the work in Swansea/South Wales?

Thanks

Alegree

If you've already played around with the wiring then I'd expect any originality value is already lost(?)
Go with what you want and have a set of components for original wiring should you come to want to sell it late in my opinion.
Don't know about pots and caps - my stab in the dark would be 300k pots and 0.022uf caps.

paganskins

Alegree said:

If you've already played around with the wiring then I'd expect any originality value is already lost(?)
Go with what you want and have a set of components for original wiring should you come to want to sell it late in my opinion.
Don't know about pots and caps - my stab in the dark would be 300k pots and 0.022uf caps.

Not me, a previous owner modded it but it was cheaper due to the mods.

Reading up on it a bit further since posting something like this seems right:



Obviously that's for Gretsch style pickups but most of the 335 diagrams I've come across also seem to use 500k pots and 0.022uf caps. 

The more I think about it removing all the piezo gubbins seems best.

I'll have a play with it tonight and see if the coil taps are worth retaining.