UNDER THE HOOD

What’s happening inside the Deluxe?

While an original Deluxe invariably used brown plastic coverplates for the control and switch cavities, here they’re standard black. Inside the control cavity, mounted via a conductive metal screening plate, are four ‘Gibson’ stamped CTS audio taper pots, nominally valued at 500kohms as you’d expect with a twin-humbucker guitar. That said, both volumes are lower – the neck drops to 422kohms, the bridge closer at 496k – and we can’t help thinking that reversing these would suit the guitar. The Orange Drop caps are .022microfarads on both neck and bridge, and the circuit is wired modern-style, like original Deluxes. The pickups are labelled for lead and rhythm positions, the Pat number is stamped on the baseplate, and the bridge is slightly hotter, but not by much going simply by the DCRs measured at output of 6.31k ohms (bridge) and 6.16k (neck). Gibson states these wax-potted pickups are “vintage replicas of the original mini-humbucker with Alnico II bar magnets” and “authentic in every detail, from the cream-colored plastic mounting and coated enamel-like wire, to the maple spacers and vintage braided lead wire”. Typically both have the same polepiece spacing that we measured at 49.54mm.

3 3. The patent number is stamped on the pickup base, while the sticker tells us this is the bridge pickup

4 4. The tidy control cavity here features Orange Drop caps and modern wiring