Gibson CS336 wiring replacement

Keefy

One of my earliest posts was commenting on this thread from 2018 by @stickyfiddle where he describes replacing the wiring loom in his Gibson CS336. Back then I already I had a problem with the bridge volume pot in my own CS336, and more recently the same thing has started happening with the neck volume pot. I'm no stranger to the soldering iron but I hate soldering to pot bodies so I bought a pre-wired ES335 loom from @sixstringsupplies and started work last night removing the strings, bridge pickup, and mounting hardware. I carried on late morning today and eventually finished this afternoon after around 5 hours of struggling and swearing.

Here's how the guitar looked with the pots and selector switch dropped into the body on surgical tubing:


And here's the new loom before the wrestling started:



The bridge pots coming out - I marked them 'B' in sharpie).


And the rest:


I found I'd underestimated how much surgical tubing I'd need so I ended up extending the pieces with hairy string! When it came to installing the new loom I decided that most of the tubing was going to be more of a hindrance than a help after all, so I only used it on the two tone pots. I ran some stiff wire through the output jack but that came off and the jack went AWOL inside the guitar. What made the job especially hard was the limited clearance between the back and the top, meaning the pots had to be manoeuvred into position on their sides and then coaxed into the correct orientation. The new loom was supplied with toothed washers but the top is too thick to allow these to be used. I feel like I've achieved a near-impossible feat, which would have been that much worse were it not for the fact that the CS336 has a side-mounted output jack on a metal plate. This allowed another access point for a finger to jiggle reluctant components into position.

All in all this was a complete bastard of a job, and one I would only consider undertaking again if it would save the life of a close family member. It didn't go unnoticed that a previous owner had chosen to splice the pickup leads in the cavities rather than do what I've just done.

Anyway it's all back together and working again, minus volume drop-outs, and sounding phenomenal though my DIY Vox AC4.

drpbier

What a ball ache. Kudos for sticking with it!

ElectricXII

Nice work. I’ve done this once on an ES-335. I wouldn’t do it again willingly. 

BillDL

Good job, but your descriptions made me smile.

I stopped using surgical tubing or lengths of string to pull the components of the loom through because I usually ended up with them tangled, and sometimes tugging a soldered wire off a connector.  I now usually pull the wires up through the F-Hole and solder them to the loom outside the guitar, then plan the insertion order out, drop the pots and switch through the widest part of the F-Hole in a sequence that keeps the loom in roughly the right shape, and use a pared-down jack soldered to copper wire to pull the output socket gently into position.  I can usually reach through the F-Hole with my fingers and chopsticks or bamboo BBQ skewers to line the pots up below the holes and then use a flat-blade screwdriver down through the hole to push gently into the split shaft (or a set of very long and skinny long-nose pliers or tweezers) and lift it up into the hole.  Hollow and semi-hollows with the toggle switch on the top horn need a bit of string or tubing though.

I've had the same problem as you with regard to the threaded collar not being long enough for the toothed washer and had to pull out the loom and start over again, so I now do a dry run with each pot before wiring up my loom.  Obviously not possible with a pre-wired loom but I usually have a spare pot that matches the collar length to use as a test piece.

stickyfiddle

Haha you’re giving me flashbacks…! 

I’ve done this on a variety of semi & hollowbodies - Dot, Casino, Gretsch 5122DC, my CS336 and ES-330. 

The 336 was by far the hardest just because you have so little room to move in there. 

I salute you for a difficult job well done!!! 

Keefy

Thanks chaps! And yes I too used chopsticks to move parts around inside the guitar, and a small flathead screwdriver into the split shaft to pull pots up.

The CS336 has particularly small f-holes but it does have a nice big cut-out in the bottom of the bridge pickup cavity, so that was the route I took.

And just to reiterate - never again!

sixstringsupplies

outstanding work with the surgical tubing - it's the best way. Great tutorial....I fill up a swear jar twice over when installing 335 wiring.

Sporky

Keefy said:

All in all this was a complete bastard of a job, and one I would only consider undertaking again if it would save the life of a close family member.

I gave you a LOL for this bit. 

normula1

Well done sir!
The neck pickup on my 339 kept cutting out, and when I fished the loom out, it turned out that the Gibson custom shop hadn't actually soldered the pickup's hot wire. Total faff to get it all back in.

ICBM

Probably not made easier by the new loom having the caps strung between the volume and tone pots - Gibson did it the other way with the caps mounted only on the tone pots for a good reason...

In most cases I'm like BillDL in that I've given up using thread - I've never used tubing - since it tends to make things more complicated than without, in my experience. I do have a purpose-made jack puller (a filed-down plug that will pass through the hole in the body, with a long length of stiff wire attached to it) but normally I do the rest with fingers through the f-holes and tools to grab the ends of the pot shafts when they're below the holes. If the loom is made fairly rigidly in the right shape first, then everything tends to line up OK once it's inside - if the wiring isn't the braided stuff that can be soldered, I use cable ties.

Keefy

ICBM said:

Probably not made easier by the new loom having the caps strung between the volume and tone pots - Gibson did it the other way with the caps mounted only on the tone pots for a good reason...

…

Yes it probably did, but the Gibson loom had teeny weeny ceramic caps tucked behind the pot lugs. If the PIO* caps had been mounted on the backs of the pots they simply wouldn’t have fit in the guitar.


*I have no axe to grind for PIO caps!

ICBM

Keefy said:

Yes it probably did, but the Gibson loom had teeny weeny ceramic caps tucked behind the pot lugs. If the PIO* caps had been mounted on the backs of the pots they simply wouldn’t have fit in the guitar.

Now you know why Gibson used teeny weeny ceramic caps in the 1960s .

(Those PIO caps would actually fit on the backs of the pots, in fact.)

Keefy

ICBM said:

Keefy said:

Yes it probably did, but the Gibson loom had teeny weeny ceramic caps tucked behind the pot lugs. If the PIO* caps had been mounted on the backs of the pots they simply wouldn’t have fit in the guitar.

Now you know why Gibson used teeny weeny ceramic caps in the 1960s .

(Those PIO caps would actually fit on the backs of the pots, in fact.)

OK I'll modify that to 'the pots would have been even harder to fit'!