Anybody know vintage Japanese pots?

[jp_nyc]

I need replacements for the volume and tone pots on the 1960s Japanese guitar I bought last month. The codes on the pots are 95KΩB 6520. I think that means they’re 95k linear pots…but I might be wrong. Anybody know anything?

 

[irishstu]

95k linear is what I would've guessed too. 6520 may mean that they were manufactured in the 20th week of 1965, but that's just an educated guess based on what I've seen on other pots.

Can't you test the pots?

 

[Wyatt]

I believe forEuropean and Japanese pots B has always been linear. That was not the case for North America.

It would be easy enough to test with a multimeter. Once you remove it from the circuit, a linear pot should read ~47KΩ from the middle to either side when set around the midpoint.

 

[jp_nyc]

Testing the volume pot won’t give a decent reading—no surprise there; that pot barely works. The tone pot read 83–84kΩ and ~47Ω in the middle. I’m not going to try chasing down a 95k pot, I’ll just go with 100k. To the store!

 

[irishstu]

Testing the volume pot won’t give a decent reading—no surprise there; that pot barely works. The tone pot read 83–84kΩ and ~47Ω in the middle. I’m not going to try chasing down a 95k pot, I’ll just go with 100k. To the store!

Sounds about right. I'm sure the 100k will be indistinguishable from the original (except that it'll work).

 

[jp_nyc]

Sounds about right. I'm sure the 100k will be indistinguishable from the original (except that it'll work).

I ended up getting 250k because that was all the store had. The luthier there told me he had never even heard of a 95k pot, and the only reference to them I could find was old Yamaha hi-fi pots. Cheapo vintage guitars are usually 500k. My guess is that either someone replaced the pots with non-guitar pots or that this guitar is so shitty that the maker didn’t even bother to buy normal guitar pots.

 

[BoomBoomBigelow]

 

[Wyatt]

The guitar would probably benefit from 250k (or even 500k) unless it was overly bright. Many of those pickups really could have used the boost from a larger pot.

Tone pot is linear. If it were audio log, it would have measured much lower...like 8-10k.

 

[Prages]

My guess is that either someone replaced the pots with non-guitar pots or that this guitar is so shitty that the maker didn’t even bother to buy normal guitar pots.

It was probably made in the same factory that was making audio equipment, and they just used the same parts for everything.

 

[jp_nyc]

It was probably made in the same factory that was making audio equipment, and they just used the same parts for everything.

From what I read many of these guitars were assembled from interchangeable parts—which is why the same pickguard shapes up on so many different Japanese guitars. So it would make sense if a non-guitar factory would just assembled guitars from various parts.