Rewired Barney Kessel

This old Barney belongs to Joey D., He's a good friend and client. Sometime in the late 70's or early 80's a previous owner Tapped the original PAF pickups and wired her up with push pulls all around. A real Professional job... not kidding well done. However, Joey's been struggling with this set up since he bought her about 10 years ago. He finally brought her to me and said REWIRE PLEASE! So back to the original wiring we go.

The first trick, and I do mean trick, is to remove the old wiring. You need child's hands to do this, so I had to use forceps and long tweezers to remove the old wiring. you can see in the images above the old push pulls, toggle and the original potted output jack.

Take a close look at the original PAF pickups. The neck pickup was tapped for split coil phazing. The Bridge pickup was tapped for Single coil use. you can tell by the leads coming out of the casing. 2 extra wires would mean there is a contact for the beginning and end of each coil. 1 extra wire means that the coils are tapped in the middle to cancel out the second coil. A real pro job by the looks of it. You can see how they re-soldered the case together after they were done. They left the original PAF stickers alone and wrote the Ohms readings on the back of the pickup.

I folded back the taps and shielded them so there would be no accidental contact to cancel either of the coils before I re-attached them to the pots.

I removed the old pots and replaced with pots I had ordered from a contact I have at the China Gibson plant. All the electronics are coming from there anyway so I might as well take advantage of any contacts I have. Saved $50 by going directly to the source. I had to wait a week for delivery but well worth it.

With the new pots wired and grounded using the original Toggle and Output jack. I then began the tedious task of placing everything back into the guitars cavity. That alone took 30 minutes.
Finger tips and Forceps in the F holes. For the record the toggle was the hardest to re-mount.
The F holes and pickup holes are just out of reach.

Now that the guts are back in, I strung her up plugged her in.
There is nothing like the SWEEEEET sound of an Original PAF...