Gibson SG pick up swap

downbytheriver

A mate brought round his SG (maybe three years old but really nice) and a pair of new Bare Knuckle P90s for me to fit them. When I opened up the back I was confronted by this (not actually my pic and this seems to have 2conductor cables which my mate’s guitar doesn’t have) 

Two things to concern myself with - funny little plugs to plug the pickups into the board and there appear to be four conductor cables into those plugs (the BKs have coax cables). My only response was that I could rewire the whole guitar with old fashioned point to point, new pots and caps etc but we decided to leave it for now. 

Any advice? 

Funkfingers

The options are:
1) Fit block connectors to the BKP pickup output cables.
2) Complete rewire with point-to-point.


Regular P90s would have a maximum of three conductors; coil start, coil finish, screen/ground. It might be possible to fool the block connectors by attaching the BKP output to terminal 1 and the braid to terminal 5.

If your mate's SG has four- or five-way pickup connector blocks on the PCB, it is intended to have humbuckers. There may be coil split wiring via the pots.

Difficult to comment further without seeing images of the guitar in question. Also, what shape are the BKP P90s? Soapbar, dogear or HSP humbucker-sized?

ICBM

Funkfingers said:

The options are:
1) Fit block connectors to the BKP pickup output cables.
2) Complete rewire with point-to-point.

3) Don't completely rewire it - there's no need, and actually the pots and PCB are high quality... it's the connectors that are shit.

I had a customer with one of these who was getting random cutting out and loss of volume - I traced it to the connectors, so I simply removed them and hardwired the cables to the pots and jack. This not only fixed the problem completely, the guitar sounded noticeably better - even though you wouldn't think so, the connectors must have been adding enough resistance to affect the signal, since nothing else was changed.

Do this:

SteveRobinson

Yes, solder the pickup wires to the pots as normal.

roberty

Ha that's some good outside the box thinking

I had a couple of PCBs I ripped out and sold. Ended up with a few extra quid in my pocket each time. No idea who's buying them but they do sell

downbytheriver

Thank you gents - seems so straightforward when you put it like that - much appreciated all round