At long last, I have gotten around to reworking my Les Paul copy guitar, which Linda bought for me in February of 1977 at Chimes Music on Walden Avenue in Cheektavegas. It cost $210, not a cheap guitar 40 years ago – which is probably why it is still around. Just like Chimes, still on Walden Avenue!
All the switches and pots had become noisy and intermittent, and the pickups seemed to have weakened with age. All of the gold toned hardware had worn to the nickel, and the output jack had become intermittent and wobbly.
I took all of the hardware off and polished the finish with Novus Plastic Polish. I can’t say enough good about Novus for any restoration project where you want to remove scratches and wear from finished and plastic lenses – I’ve been using it for over thirty years with consistent excellent results.
I scrubbed the fingerboard with Scrubbing Bubbles, which made quick work of four decades of finger oils and accumulated dust.
The finish has a number of dings where the finish has chipped off, and I decided to let that slide for now.
The frets have quite a bit of wear, but given the age of this guitar, and the changes in guitar technology over the years, it is probably not worth a complete teardown, refinish and re-fret.
I bought new CTS pots, and discovered the shafts are larger than the old ones. This is a good time to revert to hand tools! I expanded the diameter of the mounting holes with a reamer, so I could ease up to the required diameter carefully, without marring the finish.
The volume pots have DPDT switches, in 
case I want to do some future wiring modifications, and I bought .047mF “Orange Drop” capacitors to extend the tone a bit darker than the original.
A friend of mine donated a pair of Gibson pickups to the cause, and I bought replacement wiring, selector switch, bridge, tailpiece, and knobs.
The wiring was completely replaced, and wired to Gibson’s original Les Paul schematic from 1954.
I used vintage single conductor wire, with braided shield, and repaired the connections in the neck pickup. While soldering the case back together (the original solder joints holding the base to the cover had failed), the wax began melting out of the pickup. Fortunately, I realized what was happening and stopped applying the heat.
Hemostats are extremely useful for this kind of neurosurgery. (Grins)
In the future, I would not use wiring that has an external braided shield, as it makes lead dress very critical. If the wire bumps against anything unintended, you wind up with one or both pickups shorted to ground, because the entire outside of the wire is ground.
In this guitar, the control cavity is routed smaller than a Gibson, so the confines are a little more cramped, and lead dress is more difficult.
I joke that Camille just loooves when I take up the entire dining room table for one of these projects, but the whole thing only took about 6 hours over two days. (I chose the dining room table because it is a warm, bone dry, flat space with good lighting.)
Et voilà! Ready to rock!
