Official Luthiers Forum!

I had a customer’s push/pull pot spit the shaft out when I tried to remove the knob. After replacing it, I decided to do a little autopsy on the bad one. Good grief! What a poorly made, horribly designed thing it is. The shaft hooks into a plastic housing that slides two contact sleeves between three contact posts. When I opened up the back of the housing the guts flew out. I assume that was the result of the little spring in the pic. I haven’t been able to place where it goes in the assembly.

Working in aerospace, I’ve opened up a few switches in my time. This is the worst one I’ve ever looked at. I thought it was interesting that even though there is a connector on this switch, you still have to solder 3 wires to it (including the ground wire from the pcb to the case). Why go to the trouble of the connector if you still have to get in there with a soldering iron? We always considered a connector in the aircraft as a potential failure point. Man, there’s a lot of failure points in that little cavity. I would have thought that the “flagship” Les Paul (Custom Pro) would have been treated better by the factory.

Pics for your edification.

Flagship Epiphone is still an Epiphone.
I saw an Epiphone SG neck that was sanded down. The neck was literally made from various chunks of wood held together with some red goop.

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Typical low- buck component. As a EE I've seen too many.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Allan early in my career I had a NASA certified solderer who worked for me. I didn't have her skill set but she taught me about cold joints, etc. These days when I look inside an electric guitar (a daily thing for me...) what I see is some of the worst workmanship on the planet.... My condolences....

My office used to be right next to the Avionics lab at one of the major business jet makers. I got to see some of the best soldering folks in town. Especially the SMT guys. I'm with you Hesh, I don't have their skill, but I can appreciate it. They taught me some of the tricks, even though I can't make it look like theirs. The solder work in this git wasn't bad, but the whole idea of adding a connector to the pot/switch assembly, yet requiring soldering just didn't make sense.

Curious if this is the same set up Gibson has in theirs. And props to Gibson, after hearing my story of woe, they sent me a switch free of charge.

Sort of like this headstock I'm modding for a customer? Notice the splice between the first and second set of original (plugged) tuner holes

My '65 Mustang still has the original wiring harness and connectors.
Mind blogging how well stuff was made back then.

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That's because they were making an instrument, not trying to see how much money they could make off of one.