Can I save this £85 eBay guitar find? 

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A lot of the 70s MIJ Les Pauls had similar single coils in a HB case. Never seen one with the double bar magnet though. The original "bridge" looks more like a stopbar tailpiece to me.

This instrument is a wonder. From the half-arsed neck mounting and the weird fake humbucker to the margarine lid cavity cover with bacofoil shielding and the blu tack, every reveal in this video is a joy. You put more care and attention into this guitar than it ever received before. The final result looks great. Nice work on re-using that old pickguard for a cover, too.

The "baseball-"QC-sticker indicates it was made by Samick in Korea, probably in the early to mid eighties. Definitely one of their lower end models and yes, a lot of Korean and Japanese models used to come with fake humbuckers at the time.

Looks like it turned out pretty decent. I'm a big fan of single pickup guitars.

I had an LP copy that had two regular single coils under the humbucker covers. No extra magnets, no nothing. The guitar shop put in a pair of cheap used humbuckers, and even that was a huge improvement.

That wasn't a bridge that was on the Harmony originally, it was a stopbar tailpiece that someone tried to use as a bridge.

That neck pickup actually sounds good!

Just brilliant. It was always a pretty guitar but now you've made it playable too, so cool. Appreciate your content dude!

Epoxy putty works great in holes that are stripped out like the bridge holes are here. You just knead the two epoxy putty parts together, spread it around the bridge inserts and insert them back into the body. If you leave it alone for a couple hours it'll be more solid than the wood. Easy peasy and stays solid.

I absolutely love watching a neck come back to life! Edit: Dang that neck pick up actually sounds good in the bridge position.

Didn't really think that a neck pickup would sound good on the bridge position but you sir surely proved me wrong. Great job, really enjoy watching you work! Super educational as well!

Great video and awesome restoration! Humbucker sized p90s usually come in an appropriate 'one set of slugs centered' housing now, but for some reason they used to just slot them into one side of a standard chrome case - probably because the Japanese manufacturers lacked the machines to make the appropriate cases and weren't willing to make that investment.

Part of me would love to fit a badass style bridge and pop a humbucker sized P90 in that. It's giving me some 70s glam rock vibes (especially Mott The Hoople)

I love watching videos where the rescuer truly enjoys breathing life into old, dejected guitars. It turned out beautifully. Sounds fantastic!

Great job! I’m especially glad you swapped the controls around so the jack was in the right place.

That doesn’t even look like a bridge. It looks like someone used a stop tail piece as a bridge

Using the box top as helping hands for the soldering was great! I will have to borrow that idea 💡

Videos like these are great, I always learn something from them :D

Recently discovered this channel. Love your process and this certainly my type of guitar.

very cool looking guitar! glad you kept the original look and made minimal mods

Loved seeing this come back to life. It would be a brilliant giveaway. Not worth much if you sold it, but a viewer would appreciate the work and effort put in to it.

That's really cool looking!

Awesome man. Wow. Yeah keep this one. Love the work you are doing

great video dude made a decent guitar out of a pig's ear when companies originally put multiple pickups in guitars, if they were all the same type i am not sure they made "neck" or "bridge". Gibson made PAF/ P90, fender strats all just had single coils using a neck pickup in the bridge is fairly normal. i once put a bridge JB in the neck of a tele. sounded mental looking forward to next upload!

It’s everything I love in a guitar, cool, quirky, inexpensive….. love it, good job.

She lives to sing another day!...Nice work man👌👍

Damn it turned out really nice, loved the final result Seeing ur reaction when you discovered the "single coil" was really funny lmaoo

I recently got a Washburn semi hollow. The seller said frets were in great shape. I ended up recrowning and polishing them and fixing a loose bridge stud as well. Glad to see I didn’t have as many issues as you did. Giveaway or not it seems like a fun one. Great vids.

It's been my experience that, soon as you say "I don't want it to be a major project," that it will with absolute certainty become a major project. :D I had to chuckle when I saw your reaction to the pickup. Flashback city! Way back in the early 80s one of my first guitars was a cheap Hondo LP copy. Those were the pickups it had - cheap single coils hidden in the humbucker covers. As a stopgap while I saved up for some new pickups, I took the two single coils and combined them to make a humbucker. It worked, but it sucked. :D That wasn't even a wraparound bridge, it was just a plain old stop tailpiece. The HECK? I've used Gibby spaced pickups on Telecasters and the slight string misalignment's never made any audible difference vs the same pickups in other guitars with the string spacing bang on, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Thats the most bizarre pickup ive ever seen and ive been around

A cousin of mine had that same model guitar in the late 70s, early 80s when he lived in Newry. I can confirm that that pickup is indeed factory. It was a fun guitar.

I just picked up a similar guitar after seeing your short about this one. Mine’s a bit different, but the same general design and even the same color, so I think they’re probably from the same manufacturer. No brand on the headstock, Made In Korea sticker on the neck as well as a torn off model number (W0.2??) and two of those single coil humbuckers. Interestingly, no pickup selector, just volume and tone for each pickup; just turn down the one you don’t want to use. Pretty sure it’s all original based on how the control cavity is routed. It has a front mounted control plate a bit like a 70s SG Deluxe rather than coming through the back and a wire channel under the pickguard. It’s a bit shit, to be honest, but it’s lasted around 40 years by my estimate. It looks well used, if not well loved. Thanks for the in-depth video. I’ll be fixing mine up soon as well and you’ve provided some great tips.

Harmony actually started putting single coil gold foils in a humbucker sized case on their old guitars when they still made them in house in the USA. They would come on their "deluxe" models. Kind of neat to see it on one of the Harmony branded imports. The plywood guitars are not the highest end guitars but are better than most people given them credit for. I have a Hondo plywood Les Paul and it is a decent guitar.

Great job man!

Looks killer, sounds great. Good job. Definitely a keeper.

Enjoyed the strip down ..learned a lot too ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

nice job! Just a small suggestion: in the resin (epoxy or poly) if you put half of the weight of marble powder or even sodium bicarbonate, it becomes even stronger. Also, with epoxy, 7 days of curing will make it hard as a rock :)

Anothet awesome project to see! You inspired me to do my own wee upgrade to a strat clone i got for £20. Stuck £130ish worth of upgrades in to it and now it plays lovely! Only thing left is some fretwork :)

I'm not even a big fan of LP type guitars but that one looks so slick in that beautiful red.

very nice job, your videos are super relaxing

Cool guitar ! Nice job .

ahh the good old single coil in a humbucker case, a staple of cheap guitars from this time period, pure gold.

Cool 'little' project, pity it turned into a bit of a mission but it's turned out pretty good considering. Ebay descriptions... what can you say, but have always like LPJ-type guitars and you've rescued this one, (nice to hear some early Metallica too!).

I have a 1985 Hondo II “Les Paul” that had pickups like that! Singles in a humbucker casing! I was just as baffled when I took them out!

I have a Columbus MIJ Les Paul copy most 1970s are factory made with single coils , I also have a SG copy as well same make I bought them knew in 1976 from Jack Evans in Lisburn, both have exact pickups the les paul has gig'd all over Ireland with a friend who played with some of the top showband in the 70's and 80's , he liked the single coil sound,

That old bridge is definitely just the stop piece of a tune-o-matic bridge setup

It came as quite a surprise to hear another Northern Irish person on RU-vid! I feel like you don't hear people from around here too often.

New pickup looks really great with the one-piece brige

What an adventure of a build, and what a strange original pickup!

i love old harmonies i have had a few none as pretty as that. i love the lp junior vibe, it looks great. get white button tuners and it would be beautiful.

There are bridges of that style that you can actually intonate... Quad and badass both come to mind. They'll always tilt a little because of tolerances when you screw in and there's no tail piece to counterpull But you can eliminate that with locking studs.

I had those in a Hondo Les Paul. Without taking them apart you can tell by tapping on the “polepiece screws”. You get sound over them and nowhere else.

Hi from Canada! Just picked up a Epiphone LP JR. I'm going to redo. Great video!

I bought my first solid guitar in 1975 - a Japanese SG copy. It was dirt cheap and had single coils in "humbucker" bodies. Not a good buy but finances were hard in those days.

god i love the look of this guitar, we cant get stuff like this in NZ. great job man!

My first electric guitar was a MIJ Les Paul Custom that had the same pickups; single coils with humbucker covers.

I had a cheap 1970's Japanese Columbus SG, the pickups were single coil in a humbucker casing.

this channel is criminally underrated this dude is awesome

I think you saved that guitar. 1970's Harmony, even repaired like you did is worth more now. The resin trick for the stud posts is nice to know.. Others I've seen drill out bigger, plug with the dowel & then redrill. My fear was the resin would be too hard to get the screw posts back in. Which is what I thought it would still require at least some drill out, dowel plug & redrill. Then there's the ground wire that probably needed to be redrilled ?

This one came out amazingly man. I love your channel more and more because it's simple and no bs, good stuff only.

Epiphone used Humbucker sized single coil pickups in the 70s, on the popular EA250 and others. Nothing wrong with them. so did a few others like National , Supro, etc.

We tip if any tight to screw screws rub the screw on candle wax will be easier to remove as well

The bridge has been swapped with a tail piece. To me maybe trick of the camera but those frets look super biggie extra large jumbo😮. Fairly famous youtuber. Scar my guitar opened a glarey humbucker and found just a single coil. He had never seen that before 😮. The lightening bolt bridge is no more than mock saddles of a bridge allows for better intonation I'm sure you know.

This knob placement is better! I reckon this modified to a double cut, symmetrical to the lower horn like a kirt hammet esp, would be cool

That wasn't a bridge. It was part of a Tune o Matic tail piece. That's why there were no groves for the strings.

this is such a nice guitar imo! i wish i could get something like this for such a good price and fix it up myself.

Havin a great day dude

Great video. Resurrecting a guitar from the dead is a lot of fun, and very rewarding, thaks for sharing.

Nice project mate. Just goes to show without spending much money but with a healthy dose of common sense a cute cheap old guitar can live again. I bet your fret job is better than it was new. I do have to mention though, that old masking tape is notorious for sticking like sh1t to a blanket so I wouldn't bet much on that stuff coming off the body without finish damage in many year's time!

Guitar renovation for the people.❤

Columbus etc during the 70s did single coil pickups in humbucker casings on those black LP copies. I strangely liked mine as the punkist thing ever; like a telecaster gone to the gym.

Factory pickup. Alot of old Japanese guitars had single coil pickups that looked like humbuckers

Can you send it back? Too late now... In all of my years, I’ve never seen a pickup like that.. Mate, it’s up to you, but I never buy the bottom of the barrel, cheaply made guitars. They’ll always come back to bite you in the ass. Buy the best made for cheapest amount. Just how I do it. Also, no matter what, always expect a seller to screw you over. Not all will, but with that mind set, you’ll be looking for the worst, if expect the worst , you’ll dig deeper and ask more questions.. Don’t be afraid ( I don’t think you are) to ask them for more pictures. Especially questionable areas... 👍🏻 You’ve done solid and respectable repairs. Good job 👏🏻

Turned out nice

Thank you for bringing a basket-case guitar back to life. It has turned out really well This is the first of your videos that I have watched. May I complement you on your video "style" - speaking enough to explain clearly what you are doing, but not waffling on more than you need to. Got to go now - I'm off to look at some of your previous work!

I have what I think is an early 70's Conrad hollow body made by Matsumoku and the pickups are single coils in a thin and wide humbuckeresque cover. The actual body routes for the pickups are shaped like a dog ear P90

Tip. if your nut slots are cut too low you can fill them up with baking soda, drench that with a little super glue and cut the slots to the right height. Rock solid.

The fake humbucker is very common on the the bottom of the range Japanese guitars of the 70s

My Harmony LP had 2 of those pickups and the same headstock as an Epiphone with Les Paul signature on it.

Sounds pretty good

Loads of guitars in the sixties and seventies had single coils in humbucer cases my saxon Les Paul copy being one lol some of them made from drinks cans 🤣🤣🤣🤣 such fun and games!

Wrap around bridges are a no go in cheapo guitars made from plywood or actual but soft (cheap) wood like poplar, agathis, paulownia or even basswood. Studs getting pulled or squashing the wood around them is just a matter of when, not if. Wouldn't happen on any modern tune o matic knock off cause half of the tension goes into pushing the bridge in and the tailpiece is set up much lower, so there's less of a lever.

it looks cool, id use it if i was playing in a ramones tribute band

Great work! It never occurred to me before that neck and bridge pickups could have distance differences. Sounds good with gain/distortion, how is it with the cleans?

Thankfully, you didn’t have to deal with a Hondo II branded (although, I don’t think that neck actually went on the body…as there was some wood that was not chiseled out of the neck pocket!) neck. I’m now thinking it was a home repaired Gibson Les Paul wine red Custom that had a serious neck break.

I have an old 80s Mann Les Paul (post lawsuit era) that has a pickup just like that, overwhelmingly noisey, never seen them in the wild before, weird lil things

I love how the manufacturer finished the sides in such a way that shows off the beautiful plywood grain! While I was hoping to hear what that original pickup sounded like, something tells me it would be a disappointment. Replacing it was a good idea.

Original 1954 les Paul's had the same bridge, just a wraparound at an angle.

Greetings from Belgium. Thanks and congrats for your video. Perhaps it was already asked before, but would you be so kind to tell me what kind of glue you have been using ? I might be in the situation of repairing one of my guitars with the same process. Cheers.

I think it's a really great guitar by construction, but it failed on fabrication stage. I like guitars with just a single pickup, it's pretty simple and clear. Moreover, I prefer not to use any potentiometer in a circuit - just pickup, Killswitch and jack, and all of them connected by coaxial wire. Simple construction almost saying you: "There is no place for my mistakes, all faults would be yours!"

the old KKray guitars had these too

I brought a rock axe junior of gumtree Australia, not many close up photos but they were taken with a potato anyway, the seller did state that there was some splitting in the body due to moisture and a little rust ,well needless to say the poor thing was in really bad shape but I have never owned one and I could see its potential. Two months and I am still going ( scraping filling sanding three or four times I think), well it's looking good and one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done but I'm still not finished 😂

looks pretty good. kind of curious what that silly fake-bucker it came with sounded like...

2:31 my dad used to say “famous last words” fairly frequently.

bro.. i called it with the pickup. it's all good. just put it back together set up and decide after.

Beautiful 👍👍

A lot of asian manufacturers put single coils in a humbucker casing in the 70's. It was all about the look as in "Never mind the quality feel the width."

Very nice!

Nice little hobby guitar. I have my own Black Guitar Project going, so I'm watching lots of this type video. Cheers! Like your work. Subbing your channel.