Hi All,
Eros stopped by my house a few weeks ago and we took apart his GS-12.
And yes, this guitar has the straplocks pictured above.
Here are a few photos of the inside.
Here is the spot to check for the serial number. Sometimes these will have the date written in also.
Here's a picture of the cavity routing. This is the old Waltham style body routing. Note the brass tape [pickguard shield ground connection] and the green wire [bridge post grounding] used for ground shielding. When I say 'Waltham' Style routing, I'm referring to the routing shape. This shape changed at the barn and I've created another picture below to show the difference. This new routing happened after we got the new fancy overhead router. We got all excited about the cool new things we could rout! Well, I got excited about the router and made all new routing templates. When we start getting into the records that
MRW [Dick Willis' son] has we can pinpoint when that new router was leased from Roy Feldman's leasing company. [Roy was a former Waltham employee that started the Burlington Bagel Bakery.]
Note that many guitars finished at the barn had started construction before moving to the the barn.
Here's a picture of the business end of the tone switching and volume & tone controls.
The switches from left to right are...
Neck coil drop, bridge coil drop, master phase, and mater parallel/series switching.
Old vs new routing for the GS guitars.
Here is a comparison of the 2 routing styles. The 1st is my own natural mahogany GS9 #69 dated 3/80. The newer one is Bill Simmons' brown-shaded GS9 #152 dated 1/83. Eros' GS12 #106 has the early routing style.
If anyone is interested I have will be posting all the part numbers and current sources for these components.
Yesterday I took apart my GS9 to see why the switching is all screwy and found out that someone had messed with this guitar years ago [I got this guitar in 2000 and haven't touched it.] Someone had replaced the switching and screwed up the coil drops and P/S switches. When I have time, I'll rewire this guitar back to the original spec and post my progress and the schematics.
I can also see putting this post in the 'How they were made' section.
Chris