Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015 — The radio shack is serving as temporary storage for Christmas stuff while we work to dismantle all the decorations and prepare to haul them back up to the attic. That means I’m writing this from the warm confines of the library.
And it also means I’m not writing about keys or ham radio this time. Instead, I have guitars on my mind.
I’ve been battling the flu and upper respiratory infection the past week, just haven’t felt much like doing anything, frankly. But today I did feel like taking a look at my blue beauty, my new-to-me Davison Les Paul-style guitar.
I think I noted last time that one of the tone pots turned when I tried to adjust it — the entire pot turned. My fear was breaking wiring loose inside the guitar so I didn’t mess with it again. People complain loudly about the wiring jobs you find in these Chinese guitars.
I’ll have to admit that I learned a new way to remove a knob — in this case, a guitar knob — without having to pry upwards from the surface of the guitar. Take a thin cloth and slide it under the knob, wrapping it all the way around while keeping it under the skirt of the knob, then wrap it up tight so when you pull upward, all the force pulls the knob upward. It’s much easier to see on Youtube than explain.
Anyway, I thought the guitar had bell-shaped knobs on it, but on closer inspection, it has the speed knobs that have the look of the bell-shaped knobs, which is pretty much a classic Gibson look. My favorite knobs however are black speed knobs or the clear ones that don’t show the bell shape inside them quite so prominently. I bought black speed knobs for my Peavey Raptor years ago and removed their version of the Fender strat volume and tone knobs.
Anyway, I removed the knob from the loose tone pot, leaving me with a loose nut to fix; 
the only problem was the pot wanted to turn when you tightened the nut. I removed the access panel and then I could hold the pot while tightening the nut — and this worked fine.
While inside, I found the wiring looked acceptable; actually, there was a lot of slack in the wiring that I saw …. you would think as expensive as copper is, they would make their point-to-point wiring shorter, with less extra wire. Perhaps that’s because they have to use the same controls or control wiring on several different guitars? Hmm…
The nut was a 10 mm metric nut, and thankfully I had a cheap socket set in the shack, and the shaft of the pot wasn’t very long — had it been any longer, my 1/4-inch drive socket wouldn’t have worked without a deepwell socket.
Once I buttoned everything back up, I pulled up some Porter Waggoner on Spotify, hooked up the mixer, and tried the Blue Beauty out on some of the Waggonmaster’s pre-Dolly and pre-Skeeter Davis tunes. The strings on the guitar are crappy, and there’s still some work needed on intonation, but it played ok for what it is for now. I’m looking forward to a new set of strings on it and doing some setup on it — but not tonight!