I got my mojo working.

Today we restored an old ’60s era Gibson EB-O.  This thing had been through the ringer, and was seriously distressed, and… dare we say: funky.   The fretboard was caked with dirt, the frets were turning green,  the original pickup was broken, and the wiring was a disaster.

We’ve never seen a fretboard this funky.  Normally, we clean and polish a board with steel wool… but this one required a chisel. Check it out:

Much better:

The original pickup was dead – in fact, it had fallen apart completely:

One of the coils was missing, so instead of having the pickup rebuilt, we opted to replace it with a Darkstar pickup.  The Darkstar pickups are designed to recreate the sound of ’60s Hagstrom pickups used in Guild Starfire basses.  We think they sound fantastic, and our customer approved, so we had the green light to go for it.  We would have to do a tiny bit of cleaning up in the pickup cavity to get it to fit, but overall the pickup install was going to be fairly routine.  That is, until we got a look at the control cavity…

This is easily the worst shielding job we have ever seen.  Chunks of copper were being held in place with thumbtacks, and there were a couple of copper strips sitting on top of the pots (we have no idea what the purpose was behind that…).  The wiring was terrible, with poor solder joints and cheap pots: the only way to fix this is to rewire the whole thing.  We yanked out the entire wiring harness, and replaced each component with high quality Switchcraft parts.  We properly shielded the cavity with conductive paint and copper tape, and wired the whole thing up and installed the Darkstar pickup:

That’s one funky, cool bass:

We set the bass up with light strings, which combined with the short scale, make this bass super easy to play.  The Darkstar pickup sounds badass.  This bass may have lost some of it’s funk, but none of it’s mojo.

SF Guitarworks

San Francisco Guitarworks and Sonoma County Guitarworks - the Bay Areas' premier guitar service centers. We provide high-quality guitar repair and teach guitar maintenance and building workshops to all levels of musicians. Book an appointment today at sfguitarworks.com!

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Zenni

    Mine didn’t have the Bridge cover. I can see where it was, the wood is lighter. I don’t use it on stage, just a lttile at home every now and then.

  2. Rob

    Geoff, ya really oughtta wear gloves when chiselin’ da funk off (lol)

    eww..

    I’m surprised you didn’t find any earthworms living in that cavity X-D

Comments are closed.