Re-Wiring Your Tokais

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Sigmania

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I wanted to start a thread on re-wiring your Tokai guitars.

In a lot of cases, someone else has altered the wiring at some point, and you have to go in and replace things.

Also, some people pull out the PCB boards on LS and LC guitars and replace the harness, or just want to improve the tone of their guitar.

My personal feeling is that if a guitar is in original condition, I try to leave it that way, or if I change things I hang onto all of the parts so it can be reversed in the future if someone else wants to do that. These guitars will outlast me, so I am thinking about the next owner down the road.

Enough of that. Would love to see your work and hear about what you discovered along the way.
 
I'll start this off. I recently re-wired a 1981 ST70 that came to me with some really screwed up wiring. It had a tone pot for the volume so you couldn't turn the volume off, it had a 3 way MIJ Fender style selector, etc. It was a mess.

I got a lot of input from members here, Peter Mac and mdvineng, since this was the first guitar I had re-wired myself and I had no clue what I was doing. Many thanks.

Using the layout Peter suggested I have "Tone 1 for Neck and Middle pups; Tone 2 for Bridge pup."

I live in the US so getting metric pots can be a little bit of a trick. You need metric I believe to fit the ground plate holes on a Springy, and the original knobs if you still have them.

I got parts in the US from Guitar Fetish (Alpha pots, .047 uf orange drop cap, 5 way selector).

The 5 way selector fit with a little wiggling to line up the screws with the Musiclily aftermarket pick guard, and the plate.

The original pick guard was long gone and I had to try different ones to get an 11 hole that was at least close to the original holes.

The wire I used was 22 AWG Gavitt vintage style cloth push back wire that is pre-tinned.

The Weller WLC100 40 watt soldering station I got off amazon worked well.

Solder I used was 60/40, 0.6 mm diameter.

Before:

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After:

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I had a ST100 arrive with a warped pickguard.
Pickups could not be adjusted properly and were seated in a twisted position.

Easy to see why. Inside looked like this;
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Parts and tools I used. Mostly basic stuff, works good enough for me. :wink:

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I even found my scratch schematic paper! :D
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Sigmania said:
My personal feeling is that if a guitar is in original condition, I try to leave it that way, or if I change things I hang onto all of the parts so it can be reversed in the future if someone else wants to do that. These guitars will outlast me, so I am thinking about the next owner down the road.

@Sigmania, I mostly think the same. 8)

Since the ST's wiring was in far from original condition. I decided to start from scratch, and tried to get everything as neat as I could.
 
You did a great job. I had to do the same. You did your guitar justice.

After rewiring mine I know I feel more connected to it. The list of guitars I’ve said I’ll take to my grave has grown. Might be a crowded coffin. :lol:
 
I've had mine since new and I never considered myself a custodian for the future - my guitar is a tool for the now. I've stripped and rewired mine twice. I'm no professional but I do feel that my efforts look worse on camera than in reality, mostly because I left as much pickup wire intact as I could and had to coil it up to keep it out of the way.

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We've got CTS volume controls with Mojotone Custom taper, CTS Tone controls with Audio taper, Orange drop caps, modern vol/tone wiring with treble bleeds (socketed because I change my mind about them so often), PRS style coil splits on the tone controls, out of phase switch on the neck volume and series/parallel switch on the bridge volume. All middle positions are hum cancelling. The series switch works in all pickup positions and doesn't have the master vol/tone effect. The cavity is foil shielded.

I don't have a layout diagram - I tried to make one but turned into a mess and I found it easier to work it out in my head. It's basically modified Jimmy Page wiring with a few extra tricks I picked up from various places.
 
Wow. Are you using push pots for the splitting? Did you add a switches for out of phase, etc?
 
Sigmania said:
Wow. Are you using push pots for the splitting? Did you add a switches for out of phase, etc?

All four of the vol/tone controls are push/pull pots. When the pots are down everything is wired as standard, it's only when you pull them up that the effects start to happen. The push pulls are for out of phase, series wiring, and a coil split for each pickup.
 
Nice. That's a lot of control in 4 knobs!

I have had Yamaha SBGs with push pots for splitting.

I have also had Ibanez AR300s with splitting and phase control with switches, and AR500s with an additional 3 band EQ with master tone (knobs). Big control compartments on the Ibanez though.

Very cool what you did with 4 knobs in that space.

1979 Ibanez AR500 AV

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We also do glorius fails here?

THB200S
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Comes with P90's :wink:
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Have some Kloppmann SB52's that are not in use 8)
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Not :eek: :lol:
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Sigmania said:
1979 Ibanez AR500 AV

You can always tell a 70's Japanese guitar, they just have a certain vibe to them... Beautiful instruments, never seen that much in a cavity before!

I'm always surprised that more manufacturers haven't copied those control knobs with the rubber grip. They are very hard to find. I use Gibson-style knurled speed knobs which I do really like but those Ibanez ones would be better!
 
Yeah, they could get pretty complex, like the Greco Rolands like this one Pat Metheny is using. A lot of that in the late 70s. Now I guess everything is in the form of pedals and computers rather than on board circuitry.

I8R5k2P.jpg
 
WRT to Tokai Springys, I agree with felixcatus who noted in another thread on Toaki Details that the grounding plate is super cool. I like the handy lugs to solder to.

Shielding I assume as well as a common ground surface? Great idea.

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One that really benefited from a 'rewire' was my TE80R.
Changing the 1Meg pots to 250kOhm combined with a DiMarzio DP114-VT-1 made a huge difference.
 

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