Harmony H601. Help with the wiring.

Pickups, Diy Electronics, Stompboxes, Guitar wiring...
Tenderness46
Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2015 7:39 pm

Re: Harmony H601. Help with the wiring.

Post by Tenderness46 »

Paul Lafountaine wrote:Hi Alberto,

Thank you for the complments. I am glad I was able to help you and that you are enjoying your guitar. I understand how you feel about keeping the guitar as original as possible. A few years back, I purchased an old pedal steel guitar that was a built by someone many years ago and it was in rough shape. I rebuilt it as origional as possible and enjoyed it. I have enjoyed helping you and hope the guitar brings you great pleasure.

I have attached a schematic of a 50's harmony guitar that may be of interest to you. If you have any more questions please post. People here on the forum are great and are as helpful as can be as I have found.

Take care my friend and keep on posting,

Paul
Hi again, Paul. I just wanted to let you know that I finally decided to compromise between original and practical. For one thing, in the new wiring one more wire was required that was not in the wiring the guitar came with, so I used some cloth wrap wire I had. Then I used the original cloth wrap shielded wire that was in the guitar, but there was one unshielded wire with a plastic cover that had suffered from the soldering / unsoldering process and the cover was split in an area, so to avoid a possible shortcircuit, I used my non original cloth wrap wire again. Finally I tried the original capacitor and it worked fine, but I clearly preferred the way the tone control worked with the new capacitor. I found that with the new one, as you turned the tone down, you could roll off the bite while still preserving the growl. I think the sound was brighter when it was at maximum, and as you turned it down, you could get very nice tones until it was at minimum, where the sound was still usable. With the old cap I didn't like any setting other than at maximum, so I decided to use the new cap, because I want to enjoy the guitar, original or not. Anyway, and since I know now that the circuit it came with was wrong, it had obviously been messed about with, so there's no telling whether all the components were original when I first got it.

Since you have taken part in the project from the beginning and your help has been invaluable, I wanted to let you know about the final result of it. And the final result is a great sounding instrument I will certainly enjoy playing.

A nice addition to this is, since the bridge cover's chrome plate is mostly gone, I looked for a replacement on eBay, never hoping to get one. The good news is I FOUND ONE! Someone had changed the bridge of his Harmony H14 Bobkat (a Spanish guitar) and put the cover away. Then he sold the guitar, but forgot about the bridge cover, and now he found it and listed it on eBay. That has let me learn a bit about the history of Harmony guitars. In 1971 the H14 was phased out and in 1972 the H1 lap steel guitar became the H601, which was the very same guitar, but using as a bridge cover the leftover tailpieces of the H14.
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