Cool Beauty Wax Pot images
A few nice beauty wax pot images I found:
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Image by TT Zop
The pots are bolted in and the soldering performed. The shinier braided leads are from the new Gibson P-90s. The duller two are from the pickup selector toggle switch. Note the two copper grounds: One goes to the toggle switch, the other goes to the left bridge stud. I’ve noticed two ground wires in another ’72 as well. Is that unique to this model year?
The two stiff ground buss wires joining the pot cans are original. The third lugs on the Volume pots felt like they might break off if I bent them again, so I used a little piece of conductor from the braided wire to ground them instead.
The two original .022 μF 400 VDC capacitors are reinstalled. They’re Sprague® caps, known as Black Beauties; successors to the color-banded but otherwise identical Bumblebees. (Neither nickname is official Sprague nomenclature). This red-banded Difilm™ (Mylar™ and paper) version replaced the more colorful ones Gibson used from ’59 through the mid-’60s. [Neither is to be confused with the coveted Paper In Oil (PIO) Bumblebees used '59 and prior. Those featured a tiny oil filler tube, occasionally inside a blob of solder, where the lead enters the body at the yellow-banded end]. This tubular style would be used by Gibson until the early ’70s, when smaller tan-coated round ceramic discs permanently replaced them. [Some recent Historic reissues do feature Bumblebees inside, but are actually Wesco polypropylene caps in a replica shell].
Black capacitors identical to these exist with different brand names printed on them, such as Motorola or Philco, since Sprague also merely outsourced and rebranded these themselves during that time (although they did buy the real manufacturer in later years). A problem with PIO caps is value drift or decay due to oil evaporation. But Difilm caps have a solid impregnant and generally stabilize over time. I tested these with a digital capacitance meter and they’re absolutely dead on like new, far better than the ±10% original spec.
One of the leads was snapped off at the body; you can see it’s been repaired with a bead of solder. Yellow waxed cloth insulates the cap leads, as per the original. These were replicated by cutting a length of vintage-style yellow wire and pulling out the stranded conductor, using just the insulation, with a touch of clear fingernail polish on each end for appearance.
