'76 4001 Pickup Rewind/Harness Setup and Repair

[teptwizz02]

Hey y'all.
Just want to get your thoughts on what I'm thinking about doing here with my '76 4001's pickups and harness setup.
Over the years, I've done some experimenting with different pickups (humbuckers from JBE and also Creamery) and different wiring harness configurations and pot values. I've even crammed a Nordstrand active pre in there!
Right now, however, I've been wanting to get everything closer to it's stock single coil setup with some possible tweaks.

Regarding the original pickups, I was planning on sending them over to Tom Brantley for rewinding and repair. First, I'm asking him to RWRP the bridge pickup for humcancelling. The other thing I'm considering is having him overwind them about 5% to boost the low mid presence and decrease the higher frequencies slightly while upping the output a bit (I might be completely wrong about how this works, by the way). I had asked him about the possibility of the magnets having degaussed and whether or not I should consider having them replaced. He said it was pretty unlikely, but he offered to replace them with custom magnets he had ordered for other 4001 restorations if I insist on having them updated.

Onto the wiring harness, I want to reconstruct the original setup the best I can (again with tweaks). The pots need to be repaired as some are way off spec with one or two having leads broken off. One pot doesn't work at all. I'm thinking that I may replace the wiper/lead parts with those from new CTS pots while keeping the original casings and shafts. However, it seems the values of these original pots are 500k all around. Typically I would have the volumes at 250k, so I'm not exactly sure what I to do here. In terms of caps, I'll be using PIO .047s with the .0047 possibly either bypassed or removed.

I realize that so much of this depends on what I want to achieve tonally. In general, I love the vintage Ric tone, but I prefer a little less treble/high mid with a more deep bass and low mid emphasis. Anyway, as I said, I just want to get the informed opinions from the pool of enthusiasts on this forum. Thanks, guys.
Phill

[Isaac]

Nothing wrong with any of those ideas, as far as I can see.

Overwinding the pickups will increase the output slightly, and lower the frequency of the resonance somewhat (I don't know how much). That will change the character of the treble response, moving the response peak down toward the midrange. Another way to do that is to put a capacitor in parallel with the output.

Higher value potentiometers increase the magnitude of the resonance peak, making the instrument sound more trebly (or more midrangey, depending on the frequency of the peak). Sounds to me like that is not what you're looking for. Lower value pots, such as 250K, will lower the magnitude of the peak, which should accentuate the lows and mids. Another way to do that is to put a resistor in parallel with the output. That's actually how a passive tone control works for much of its travel.

You could also just back off on the tone control. That way, you'd have the option of making it brighter if you ever wanted to. Same with amp tone controls. But there's definitely something to be said for getting the instrument to sound exactly the way you want it to sound.

[teptwizz02]

Thank you so much for your informative reply.

Based on what you're saying, it seems that overwinding with higher value pots kinda cancels each other out tonally. I guess I was looking to get the harness back to stock specs with a few tweaks. I've wired harnesses in the past with 250k volumes and 500k tones which I liked. I actually have a harness in another Ric that I wired mono and used 250k linear pots for the volume. Not sure that the linear pots made much of a noticeable difference, but I read that some folks did this so I thought I'd give it a try. I rarely use the volume knobs for blending, so I guess having linear or logarithmic pots is sort of irrelevant. Either way I plan to have those pickups rewound possibly 5% over, and I'll figure out the harness later. Thanks again for your input!

[Isaac]

Glad I could help.