This old 60's Ibanez came in recently that a friend had bought but the electronics weren't working properly. He asked me to check it out and see if I could get the original rocker switches working as the guitar just had both pickups permanently on and the tone pot wasn't working.
These old rockers can be ... difficult to fix but is doable sometimes as I've written in this old blog post. This Ibanez had exactly the same switches as fitted to that old Guyatone so I was fairly confident I could salvage them.
After opening it up the wiring was a mess. Whoever did this shouldn't be allowed near a guitar, let alone a soldering iron. The rocker switches were just simply bypassed completely and both pickup hots were (badly) soldered to the volume pot.
After removing the rocker switches, I could see why they hadn't even attempted to try and fix them. The brass blades which make contact to the rockers were all bent and flattened so had no hope of making contact to turn anything on or off. I appeared no attempt had been made to try and fix them, so I pulled the switch apart and started trying to get contact.
The thin brass contacts were not going to have any part of it so I tried a few other ideas I'd used in the past, but although I could get them to work, nothing was proving reliable enough to put back together.
So, I did my usual thing. I made a cup of tea and listened to some music until something came to me.
A few years ago, I was given the entire contents of a local electronics shop who had been going for 50 years and were getting out of components. Along with thousands of components I was also given boxes of thousands of new switches of all kinds. I went through a couple of boxes to get inspiration of something to replace these switches with. While nothing was close enough to look original, I found a few bags of push/push latching mini switches which gave me an idea.
I checked for clearance and size and then drilled some holes in the original switch baseplate. I drilled them on the opposite side of the original contacts so if, on the rare chance some original parts became available, this switch could be fixed and used as standard without any sign from the outside.
I fitted the new switches and had to cut the length of the arm to fit under the rocker switch when fully extended, but still switch when rocked forward. This took a little bit of massaging but once one was sorted the others were cut to the same length. With the switch reassembled to mini switches, which can't be seen from the outside, just engage their ON-OFF position when activated by the rocker.
What this means of course is that the switch no longer rocks down for off and up for on, but up for on and up for off, but also gives a positive "clunk" when switched. It also however means you can't just knock them and accidently switch them on and off, which is a real problem with these rocker switches.
So, the guitar looks all original (I mean, it's not but the switches do) and it works to switch each pickup on and off and have a tone switch, just like the original switches did. Mission accomplished.