How do you change pickpus in hollow body guitar

[brisk]

I just got a 335 copy and this guitar doesn't have control cavity. I can barely see pots though the F hole. Any idea?

[Chaos]

Dental floss...
tied to the components that you need to remove

Drop everything out of the 'F-hole', solder then pull everything back into place with the dental floss.

[scooter]

You should be able to pull the pots through the F holes and solder. That's how I've done it in the past. Make sure to protect the body when you do this.

[Tweed]

Are you planning to change pots and caps while you're in there? Stew-Mac used to make a template card thingy that you could mount the pots on, so you could keep the spacing right between pots while you soldered your new connections. I dunno if they still make it, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to have one. I've got a 335 that I need to replace everything on..not looking forward to it, but its gotta be done. The floss is a good idea. Somewhere I have a pictorial that shows the different steps to doing this. If I can find it I'll post the pics.
If you're just doing the pups, you could just cut the wires at the old pups, and solder your new ones in that way. Some guys solder pc-board connectors to the cut end of the guitar's wire, so they can swap pups in and out. Still going to have to cut lead on the new pups tho. Tough to resell if you ever wanted to unload them.

[PUCKBOY99]

Brisk, I answerred in another thread, but instead of dental floss I used the old "G" string....not as flimsy & easier to control. You just make a little hook on the end & fish thing back into place.

Takes a lot of patience, but it isn't brain surgery. My dumba$$ did it!!!!

OH...and another tip: Once you get it wired up, test everything before fishing the controls back thru...then once the controls are back in, don't tighten anything up until testing again.


..........and another tip: To protect the finish from something that is bound to scratch, I first covered the guitar in saran wrap & poked out the appropriate holes.....but I found the saran wrap was a bit thin, so I switched to a garbage bag. Worked pretty well !!!

[Lewguitar]

On some guitars it's easier to fish the controls out through the pickup rout...it's a bigger opening than the F Holes. Lew

[orbiter]

you can make that templet yourself using cardboard or something like that ... trace the hole layout .. and cut out the holes ... then mount everything to the templet and solder all conections ..

I've been using dental tools along w/ the string to remove and replace and/or fish out the electronics. these work great as they're small enough to fit through the mounting holes for the pots.

I also made a Jack "puller" for these guitars ... I took a cable apart and stripped down the tip .. no housing or coller... then I attach a guitar string to where the cable would normally be soldered to the tip ... feed it through the the jack hole .. into the body and over to the p'up route ... stick the cable end into the output jack and pull it thru ... this also gives me something to hold onto while I put the washer and nut on the output jack. works like a charm unless the output jack is super sloppy.

I also put a little mark on each pot so I can tell them apart by seeing just the top of the shaft... keeps me from pulling the wrong pot through the wrong hole and kills some of the "guesswork"

~G

[PUCKBOY99]

Like Lew said, take the pickups out first. My Sheraton was a semi-hollow, so the block was in the center & the routing under the pickups were minimal.

In your hollow body, they might be bigger & easier to maneuver thru.