Today was a good day!

[NovaSDF]

Got the Epi Les Paul rewired with vintage braid. Much happier with it. We live in a very old apartment with dirty wiring (which is being kind.) The vintage braid seems to help with cutting some of the noise.

Did the SG yesterday and nothing seemed to go right. Shouldn't pick up a soldering iron when you're tired. Made all kinds of stupid mistakes.

Today went as well as yesterday did poorly. Everything worked right first time out, with the exception of the jack (which is soon going to be replaced with a switchcraft.) Damn, the Les uses a lot of wire! SG was all done using 3 feet (including soldering it from the pickups back as leads) - whereas the Les Paul used just over 8 feet. Lots of wire to run from the switch back to the controls of the LP.

If anyone new out there is considering swapping out the wire in their guitar, 4 feet of braid for a SG is plenty, 10 feet for a Les Paul will give you a bit left over.

(All wires changed to vintage except for bridge ground.)

I also soldered the braid from the pickups to the braid wire from switch (to jack) to ground the pups. Saved the effort of soldering them to the back of the pots. Just found it easier, made a nice neat job, and it worked just as well. One of the big advantages to using metal braided wire.

 

[ARandall]

8 feet of wire, were you trussing up a turkey in there??

and for an SG all you need is the main output done if that.

 

[NovaSDF]

For both guitars, everything was converted to vintage braid.

I ran a wire from jack to switch, snaking from pot to pot to ground them. It basically runs from jack to lower tone pot, up to upper tone pot, across to upper volume, down to lower volume, then through the guitar to switch. That ends up being a fairly long wire, but eliminates the need for separate ground wires to the pots. It ends up being a fairly long wire.

Then ran wires from switch back to volume pots.

Finally, snipped off the leads about 1 inch from the pickups and soldered on vintage braid leads.

I did leave about an extra 2 inches of wire at the jack, so that if a wire comes loose in the future, I can unscrew the plate and easily reattach it. (Especially since I know the Epi jack will need to be replaced at some future point.)

I'm guessing I had about 2 feet left over from my original 10 feet. The decision to convert the pickup leads added a couple of feet. I really wanted the maximum shielding from the wire. The original pickup leads were just vinyl insulation, and I'm not sure how well shielded they were. Noise in our apartment is such an issue, and I felt the metal shielding on the vintage braid would be best, so I used it everywhere I could. I also tend to cut the wires an inch or two longer than necessary, to sooth my paranoia about screwing up when I strip the ends.

 

[NovaSDF]

Here's a photo of the new wiring in the Les Paul. I wish my soldering was a bit neater, but I just work on my own guitars so I don't do a lot of it. Still, getting a bit tidier each time. (Thought I'd better include a photo, just so you don't think I have wire crammed everywhere.)

Here's a tip for newbies like myself. I used two small pieces of heat shrink tubing of different colors on leads for the pickups, in particular blue=bridge and white=neck. That way, I was able to tell which was which since both look the same with the vintage braid.

Since I also replaced the pickup leads with vintage braid by soldering them close to the pickup (splicing them onto the original leads), I decided it was wise test them before hooking everything up. To make a tester, just solder a red wire with an alligator clip to the hot lug from a 1/4 inch jack and a black wire with similar clip to the ground lug. With the pickups in the guitar and just the low E string in place, clip the red wire to the hot wire of the pickup and the black wire to the ground covering of the pickup wire. Plug your amp into the jack and make sure you have sound. This way, if you don't get sound later on, you will know that your pickup is functioning correctly for the purpose of troubleshooting. (Learned this lesson the hard way with the SG - spent time trying to figure out what I'd wired wrong and it was an issue with the pickup.)

By running the wire from the jack to the switch around the pots like this, it makes it easy to reach the capacitors as there is nothing obstructing them. I usually solder the caps in last, and if you want to change them our for different values at some future point it makes it a great deal easier having nothing in the way - plus it looks very tidy.

Don't worry about mixing up the leads from the pickup selector switch. Just solder in the switch and leave enough wire to reach either volume control. If the switch is wired backwards, you can easily just reverse the wires on the different pots.

With the vintage wire, I soldered the pickup wire coating to the coating of the main hot wire from jack to switch. Just use 2 alligator clips to hold the wires together leaving a bit of space in-between for solder. It makes for a very good ground connection for your pickups and eliminates the need to solder the pickup grounds to the back of the pots (especially if you hate soldering stuff to pots the way I do.) Looks very tidy as well.

I should also mention that I had no clearance issues with the Epi Studio LP, in terms of running wires through the body. I saw somewhere that there were concerns about this with some Epi's. Between the bridge pup and the control cavity you need to run 5 wires, 3 to the switch and 2 to the pickups. Plenty of space to do this.

I should also mention that Radio Shack sells an assortment pack of heat shrink tubing in various sizes/colors. Very handy to have, as you want to make sure everything is insulated where need be. Also useful for color-coding wires as mentioned above. Used it mostly to insulate the splices from the pups to the vintage wire. In this case, I was using pickups with 4 wires. 2 wires were soldered together and insulated separately, the hot wire was soldered to the hot vintage wire and the ground wire and the ground braid from the pups were soldered to the vintage braid. Make sure you check your manufacturer for the correct color codes, as different makers sometimes use different color combinations.

I'm very happy with this project. Love the way it looks, and love the ease of access to the caps. Way better than the rats nest of modern wire. The metal shielding of the vintage wire definitely seems to do a better job of combating the noise in our old apartment. Well worth the effort.

 

[ARandall]

so you've completely rewired the guitars but kept stock pickups????

You don't need the braided for short runs like back of pots....anything that a short run picks up is way out of human hearing range.

 

[NovaSDF]

Yes, but I really like the look of the vintage braid in the control cavity. The run from the neck pup to the volume pot, in my mind, isn't really all that short - probably more than a foot in length. I also couldn't be sure how much shielding was on the pup wires, since they were bargain-basement pups. And since I was tearing everything out anyway...

The effort paid off. The guitar is now much quieter.