Loads of "pot"...no highs!

The bridge humbucker of my 74 SG uses a 300K volume pot and I want to replace it with a 500k pot to increase the highs. Here's the clincher: I'd like to take the pot apart and leave the original soldering intact and install parts from another 500k pot. Is this feasible and if so any suggestions on a suitable pot? The original is a 137.

If you have enough room to work inside
the control cavity you can keep the ground solder
joint , but the important part you will be
replacing is the restistor element that you will have to
unsolder and resolder with the hot P/U lead and
the capacitor lead.
137 is a CTS pot and you can get those from
Allparts and other venders.

sparkletop, I'm please to hear that someone else around here is willing to take pots apart and swap the guts. hee hee :lol

I've done this before, but as to you wanting to "leave the original soldering intact", I would say forget it. The three terminals that you make connections to and the resistive element are basically all one piece, you can't possibly swap that without undoing the soldering of the hot lead from the pickup, the wire to the selector switch, etc. You could maybe try to leave the original pickup ground connection to the pot body and work on the pot within the cavity area (you would only have as much slack as there was wire length for the pickups), but I can't imagine even trying that. You are absolutely going to have to undo some of the connections, so I don't see the point in trying to go part way and save the original ground connections.

I have found that the resistive element of the split knurled shaft CTS pots is removeable/replaceable, so if you were to get some CTS made pots from AllParts, you should be able to swap the guts. I would first have to double check some pots from that era to be sure, to make sure the CTS stuff from the 70s is compatible.

If you want to do some kind of upgrade to improve things, I could offer a different suggestion that would make use of what you may already have. Check if you have 500K tone pots, that was and still is common. If so, undo all the connections (well if you really want to make a significant improvement we have to forgot about the original solder joints, end of story), remove the pots, and swap them around putting those 500Ks in use as the volumes. Next temporarily remove the metal shell of the 300K pots and put some clear nail polish on the very end of the resistive track where the wiper would be at the full on tone setting of 10. Let the nail polish setup, put those pots in as the tones, and put it all back together. As you adjust the tone from about 9 to 10, the wiper should hit the nail polish insulation effectively disconnecting the tone pot completely leaving you with only the 500K volume pot. This will give you the maximum possible response from the pickups, max high end.

Oh yeah then crank it up :wail:

Thanks guys. Yeah, I dont mind the terminal joints being redone if I can keep the original pot body. I do not mind doing the extra work if it helped keep as much of the original parts intact . These guitars are not that collectible by no means but I like to keep things as original as I can.

I just had a reminder today that for a while sometime after 1973 there were times when they were into using 300K volume pots and 100K tone pots (God what were they thinking). If you are interested in getting more life and zip out of your existing pups I would suggest to look into what's going on with both the volume and tone pots.