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Your wish is my command!
Originally Posted by Patrick2
This guitar is dated as 1980 as my good friend Bill bought it new.
Check out the patina on the machineheads
More nibs. Bill is a Baroque piano restorer (no, really, he is one of a very few in the whole of Europe).
Blonde, you were right. Bill plays classical guitar and wanted to learn to play jazz so he bought this.
Oo! The patina money cannot buy! So he tried and gave up early eighties and put the guitar to bed as it were.
It came to me for an electrical fault and set up. The acorn nut here had hardened grease on its thread.
The adjustment screws look huge! Note the split on the p/u ring and that patina!
The bridge was made in Germany!
With new strings and more patina.
Here she is. Flawless. No scratches, no dings. Not even a fret dress, this is how it came. He doesn't do string bends, just chord melody and that's all. He did take off the case blanket and threw it away though, yikes!
The electric fault was weird. I cleaned all the switches and pots, still no joy. He had took it to a shop tech previously and the diagnosis was broken pickups and faulty pots!
As the guitar is pristine I thought the prognosis somewhat short sighted and no research was done.
I fixed it tho'. And how!
Well I surmised that there must have been some sort of patination of the coil wire as it is the thinnest. I hooked up a 9 volt circuit tester and by putting + to + and - to - and tapped on and off on the positive part of the circuit while thinking over why it wasn't working. The VU meter slowly climbed in value with each tap up to 8ohms!
WTF I thought, did the same in the other p/u in the same manner and the same f#####g thing happened and everything worked! Wow!
I think it was like pushing out an air blockage in a water pipe, that sort of thing.
He's looking to sell it at the moment, any idea of its value P2?
But with his fine woodworking skills and my tech skills we have customised a Peavey Strat for his incredibly large hands
2"
52mm
The original neck planed flat in the centre with wider maple wings glued on
Look at the beauty of his work. All with chistles
He even oversized the head and added veneer.
Me fret pressing
I thought I had finished pictures but this is as far as my record of this went. I'm seeing him isoon so I'll grab some more.
I have christened it the Straat as it is wider than a normal Strat.
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01-21-2015 02:13 PM
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Not sure that current flow in a wire is like fluid in a pipe, but I'm glad you fixed it. That strat neck is immense!
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I can't explain why it worked the way it did. It did though and everyone is happy Originally Posted by plasticpigeon
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jazzbow . . given the one owner provenance, the Shaw pups and condition of that 335, I estimate the current market value at low to mid $3,000s. Which in my opinion is a great price on a 335 from that era.
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P2, thanks for your help. Originally Posted by Patrick2
I put it in the same area too.
Shaw p/u's? Enlighten me please.
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OOPS!! Typo. His name is Tim, not Tom. There's a long story about Tim Shaw pups. (I love telling stories) But, gotta run now. I'll come back after dinner and give you the run down. Originally Posted by jazzbow
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OK . . . so, I'm back. Rather than to give info off the top of my memory . . I did a cut and paste of a good article on it. It is a widely held belief, that the Shaw designed pickups . . are the most accurate at capturing the highly sought after PAF "tone from God" that many relate to the original '57, 58 & '59 bursts . . and the '58, '59 and '60 ES335s: Enjoy the long read.
"Tim Shaw who designed these pickups under Norlin restraints did a remarkable job IMO. They really are a neat sounding alternative to most humbuckers. the Magnet , as was explained to me was "Unoriented AlnicoV" I do not know what that means other than it isn't a regular AlnicoV. It seems that AlnicoV has higher gauss mesurments or something to that effect than any other type of pickup magnet, and Tim said that by deleteing a final step that puts a full charge or orientation on the magnet, the tone was closest to what he was after. It was a long time ago, but that is how I remember it. I really don't understand all the fine points of Magnetism so I could have some terms mixed up. Basicly it is a real cool sounding, Big Al approved magnet. This is what I put in my Antiquities.
From Gibson on Shaw:
"Whether it was rivalry between plants or increased market awareness, the Nashville plant jumped into the reissue action in 1980. By this time, one of the most glaring deficiencies of new Les Pauls (compared to the originals) was the humbucking pickup. In preparation for its first attempt at a reissue, Gibson assigned engineer Tim Shaw the job of designing a reissue of the original Patent-Applied-For humbucking pickup-within certain restrictions. "This was 1980 and Norlin was already feeling the pinch," Shaw said, referring to Gibson's long decline through the 1970s and early '80s. "We weren't allowed to do much retooling. We redid the bobbin because it was worn out. We got some old bobbins and put the square hole back in. We did it without the T-hole, which stood for Treble."
To replicate the magnets, Shaw gathered up magnets from original PAFs and sent them to a lab to be analyzed. "Most were Alnico 2's," he said, "but some were 5's. In the process of making an Alnico 5, they stick a magnet in a huge coil for orientation, but an unoriented 5 sounds a lot like a 2. They started with Alnico 2 and then switched to Alnico 5."
Shaw discovered that the original magnets were a little thicker than 1980 production magnets. "Magnetic strength is largely a function of the area of the polarized face; increasing the face size gives you more power," he explained. So he specified the thicker magnet for the new PAF.
Wiring on the originals was #42 gauge, which Gibson still used. However, the original wire had an enamel coating and the current wire had a polyurethane coat, which also was of a different thickness or "buildup" than that of the original, which affected capacitance. Norlin refused to go the extra mile-or extra buck, as it were. Enamel-coated wire cost a dollar more per pound than poly-coated. Shaw could change the spec on the buildup without additional expense, so the thickness of the coating was the same as on the original wire, but he was forced to use the poly coat. The difference is easy to see: purple wire on the originals, orange on the reissues.
Shaw later found a spec for the number of turns on a spec sheet for a 1957 ES-175. "It specified 5,000 turns because a P-90 had 10,000 turns and they cut it in half," Shaw said. In reality, however, originals had anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 turns, depending on how tight the coil was wound. Shaw later met Seth Lover, who designed and patented Gibson's humbucker, at a NAMM show. Lover laughed when asked about a spec for windings, and he told Shaw, "We wound them until they were full."
The spec for resistance was even less exact, Shaw said. The old ohmeter was graduated in increments of .5 (500 ohms). Anywhere between 3.5 and 4 on the meter (3,500 to 4,000 ohms) met the spec. Consequently, Shaw pointed out, there is no such thing as an exact reissue or replica of the 1959 PAF pickup. There can only be a replica of one original PAF, or an average PAF. As Gibson would find out in the early 1990s, the same could be said about the entire guitar.
Shaw's PAF reissue debuted on Gibson's new Nashville-made Les Paul Heritage 80 in 1980. Compared to anything Gibson had previously made (which is to say, compared to nothing), it was an excellent reissue of a sunburst Les Paul Standard....."
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P2, thanks for the information. It's duly logged and noted in the old jazzbow brain box Originally Posted by Patrick2
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