NGD - My First Les Paul .. and advise needed?

sweepy

For pickups, check out OX4’s, still the nicest PAF clones available imho, lovely and articulate with no harsh or shouty overtones

roberty

crunchman said:

guitars4you said:

timmypix said:

If you can get a multimeter reading, you should be able to ask Bare Knuckle themselves for some help identifying the pickups.

measure them and chances are you can equate what they are by looking at the various specs on the BK web site

The quick and easy way to do this is to just put a jack lead into the output and measure the resistance between the barrel and tip on the other end of the lead on the individual pickup settings.

Because of the resistance of the pots in parallel, the reading your multimeter gives will be very slightly low.  E.g a 9kOhm pickup will give a reading of 8.84kOhms with a 500k pot in parallel.  That's more than close enough to get an idea of what the pickup is so I wouldn't worry too much about the discrepancy..

If you are a pedant and want to be exact then the formula is here:

https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/resistor/res_4.html

Edit: Speed knobs are much easier to use

What a cool tip! Nice

mort

Have you tried removing the knobs yet? Can be a bit of a bastard. Broken knobs and worse still, pot shafts. I know from bitter experience....

absolutpepper

ahh seems you bought a LP off a JoBo fanboy as i’m pretty sure he does this with his les pauls. Top Hats for me.

also, dont worry about removing the knobs..if theyre a little stiff just wrap a shoelace around the underside and gently pry them up. Should come off fairly easy and without damage

bodhi

Very nice - good score!

My vote would be for gold reflector knobs with silver inserts.

roberty

mort said:

Have you tried removing the knobs yet? Can be a bit of a bastard. Broken knobs and worse still, pot shafts. I know from bitter experience....

Have you tried the shoelace trick?

mrleon83

roberty said:

mort said:

Have you tried removing the knobs yet? Can be a bit of a bastard. Broken knobs and worse still, pot shafts. I know from bitter experience....

Have you tried the shoelace trick?

I’ll be doing this, just ordered some good top hats/Bells ... 

Fez

Nice guitar - happy NGD. As a side note it is well worth improving your soldering. When I did electronics at college the first thing we had to do was soldering practice. We were given a piece of tag strip and some solid copper wire (tinned) and had to cut the wire to length and solder it across the tags, after doing that most soldering comes easy. Actually a lot of it is about "work holding" if your components are held steady in a vice or other suitable holding tool then soldering is much easier.

mrleon83

Fez said:

Nice guitar - happy NGD. As a side note it is well worth improving your soldering. When I did electronics at college the first thing we had to do was soldering practice. We were given a piece of tag strip and some solid copper wire (tinned) and had to cut the wire to length and solder it across the tags, after doing that most soldering comes easy. Actually a lot of it is about "work holding" if your components are held steady in a vice or other suitable holding tool then soldering is much easier.

You make a good point, I bought a soldering iron but its gas and a pain in the backside, maybe i'l pick a wired one up, do be honest some of the soldering looks a bit rough on this guitar so it could be a great practice bed.. any tips as far as guitar soldering goes?

rico

Try lowering the pickups before you go mad swapping them out 

mrleon83

rico said:

Try lowering the pickups before you go mad swapping them out 

cool, so I've done that and I'm way happier ! .. now I need to clean the switch (I think) the neck pick up has hardly any output and pretty noisy, whats the best way to do this? I've sprayed it with contact cleaner and it seems a lot better but not quite there..  

historyisjunk

For removing the knobs, hopefully they'll just pull off, but if you find a shoelace still won't move it try a rag wrapped under as much of the knob's circumference as you can.

Try a bit of fine wet or dry between the switch contacts. Wet or dry, rather than ordinary sand paper as you don't want bits of grit coming off into the switch works. Maybe the soldering on the switch is poor? (from what you said)

PS I like reflectors & bells best too....