re: Hardware shopping for Les Paul

[William Walker <billwalker@baymoon.com>]

If  my experience buying and selling vintage guitars over the last 30  
years carries any weight with you Louis , my advice to you is if it is  
stock, I would only replace gears with kluson or klusen style   
reproductions that fit the exact footprint, several good quality ones  
are available from WD and Allparts. don't ream out your tuner holes  
for larger tuners if you can help it. it will de-value your  
instrument. Are yours the tulip shaped metal ones with gibson stamped  
on the back, or do they have plastic buttons?  If its already been  
done before, try to at least match the foot print of the newer tuners  
rather than make new holes. getting a new nut and having fret work  
done is essential and won't effect the guitars value, the bridge, is  
most likely bowed by this point, the result of years of string  
tension, and the commonly held belief  that screwing a stop tail piece  
all the way down gives you more sustain and better coupling, true to  
an extent, but it will also increase the likely hood of string  
breakage, and the afore mentioned bridge warping, and hey its a les  
paul, its got the sustain thing happening.  also its probably prone to  
vibration issues as its gotten stressed over the years. So you will  
need to get a bridge and i would suggest a tone pros tune-amatic as  
they have set screw anchor reinforcements so they couple better. ditto  
with the stop tail piece, keep your originals. As far as the tone  
controls go, they often can be revived with some contact cleaner and  
the toggle switches and jack can be re-tensioned, so again replace  
only if you have to.  ditto with the pickups, though in this case if  
you really want a change keep the old ones and avoid routing if at all  
possible. As far as humbucking pickups go if you are going for a  
classic sound bear in mind that you probably have a maple neck that  
sounds brighter than a mahogany neck so a slightly overwound pickup  
might darken it up a bit to compensate. I like pickups with alnico II  
magnets,they are warmer with better sustain than alnico v's or  
ceramics.  Duncan makes some great ones and they would sweeten up a  
maple neck guitar. I suspect your guitar is suffering form fret issues  
bridges issues  nut issues and tuner issues and electronic issues not  
related to the pickups, and if you get those taken care of first, you  
might find you like the sound of the stock pickups.
Bill