Epi Casino pickup has died

[Ruatit]

I have a 10 year old Epihone Casino with 2 P90 pickups, 2 tone and 2 volume pots, and a 3-way selector switch
The bridge PU has just stopped working... dead.... nothing, not even a hum!
I am no techie when it comes to guitar electrics, but I am an electrician and I might be able to fix it! The main problem that I see is that it is dificult to get to the pots etc in a hollow-bodied archtop, I guess that everything has to be dragged out through the pickup holes to be able to test.

I have managed to hook the selector switch out through the F hole and it looks ok. How can I test the PU?

Does anyone know what the fault is most likely to be? and some simple checks that can be done before I rip everthing out of the guitar body.

[David Schwab]

They are pretty lousy pickups, so take this as an opportunity to put something better in there.

I had a customer bring me one of those back then and we replaced the hardware and pickups. We used Duncan Alnico II Pros, and it sounded like a new (and better) guitar.

[Ruatit]

Thanks for the reply David
I know that the Casino is a relatively cheap guitar, and therefor made with crappy parts, but how much do you spend on it?
I bought it 3 months ago and it cost more than normal because it's a lefty, they stopped making them some years ago and are hard to find. I had a fret dress and set-up done and also changed the tune-o- matic bridge to one that can be locked with hex screws.

It's a beautiful guitar and i'm unlikely to ever sell it, and I suppose my real problem is how much do you change on it before it stops being an Epiphone Casino?

Would the pickups you mentioned got straight in without any mods?

[David Schwab]

It's a beautiful guitar and i'm unlikely to ever sell it, and I suppose my real problem is how much do you change on it before it stops being an Epiphone Casino?

Changing the pickups and hardware wont stop it from being a Casino. And it's actually NOT an Epiphone Casino. It's an Asian copy of an Epiphone Casino. So it never had the right parts to start with. There's no long term value on these Epiphones. So you aren't devaluing the guitar. So make it playable.

You already changed the bridge, so new pickups will make it sounds a lot better. On the guitar I worked on, we changed the bridge, tuners, and pickups.

The one I worked on was actually an Epiphone Sheridan. So you have the P-90's on yours. I'm not familiar with the quality of the P-90's, but they aren't real Gibson pickups either.

Regardless.. it could be just a short of broken connection, and might even be the pickup selector switch. It might not even be the pickup.

They are a pain to work on, since you have to fish all the wires out of the guitar. But you wont know until you start looking at the wiring.