The Tale of a Toasted Taylor
Why do manufacturers of instruments and music gear have to make it neigh on impossible for users to repair?
So, over the years, I’ve gathered a bit of a guitar collection. Here’s a pic:
Some of these have gained value over the years. The best examples would be the ’68 Gibson ES335 and the Bonnie Rait Strat and maybe the Reverend Avenger. But I did not spend much on any of them. I paid $325 for the 335 back in ’76 which the handy dandy online inflation calculator says is about $1600 in 2022 dollars. Reverb.com pegs the current value as north of $6K. At least. The Strat was a Christmas gift back in ’96 from my mother and my wife and the same site says it sells now for about $2K which I guarantee is about four times what they paid for it and the Reverend….
Long story but it came as a review unit when I was doing GIG Magazine back in probably ’98-ish. It was supposed to be used as a reader giveaway. But this all happened right at that point when GIG moved from the NYC office where it lived with titles like Pro Sound News and EQ to the Bay Area office where it lived for a few years with Guitar Player et al. It seems odd, but the NYC operation ran like a startup running out of the founder’s garage and the Bay Area office was 1000 times more corporate. I remember my first meeting with my new publisher in San Mateo and told him we were giving the guitar away and he freaked out and said he would have to get with the legal department and that never happened. Bottom line is it never got given away. It’s a very early example of the model and has “#00392” handwritten along with Jon Naylor’s initials on the back of the headstock. It’s worth a couple grand at this point. It would be more if the white-wall style case were in better shape.
Anyway.
There are only a couple guitars that I have ever spent “real money” on. There is the axe that has become my #1 go-to for almost everything. That is the Starbird Elite made by Neil Smith at Vegas Guitars which was a bargain at $2500. I’ll do a video on just that guitar at some point but for now, let’s just say that I can get typical Gibson and typical Fender sounds (including stuff like the “cool guy” 4th position on the 5-position switch which combines the bridge and middle pickups) out of a single instrument. It also has piezos in the bridge saddles and a preamp and those, combined with some really good acoustic guitar impulse response files for the Line 6 Helix means it can sound like a decent acoustic guitar as well. It’s the greatest gigging guitar ever.
It is also a damn sexy beast. This pic was taken before the chrome pickup covers were put on.
The other “real money” guitar is a Taylor 512CE. I did get a deal on it. It was another review unit but this one I bought. So I got it for something close to dealer cost. If I remember right, it was right about $1800.
It’s a great guitar with one big design flaw. This was the first of the Taylors with the Expression pickup system. Basically this is a series of three magnetic pickups mounted inside the guitar coupled with a decent preamp. The system has undergone some changes (more on that in a minute) and the consensus seems to be that the ES2 system which came out in 2014 (I bought this guitar in about 2010) is a big improvement, but the original ES is, to my ears at least, a huge improvement on the typical piezo systems common in most amplifiable acoustic guitars at the time.
The flaw is all about power. There are a few videos attached to this piece where you can see what it looks like. Basically, there is a battery box which includes the power supply and preamp which is mounted in the foot of the instrument. Without removing it, you see a strap pin which doubles as the output jack and, next to that, a twist-lock cap for the battery compartment. Take off the cap to put in or take out a pair of AA batteries.
The problem lies with those AA batteries. The truth is that AA batteries are substantially more prone to leakage than the 9-volt batteries that are far more common in guitar preamp systems. Why? Because, a 9-volt battery is not a single power cell. It is actually six power cells that each produce 1.5 volts of power. They are basically taped into a block with plastic wrapping and then that whole block is encased in what we think of as the body of the battery. So, in comparison to a AA battery, there are *two* additional layers of protection. It you were to open up the casing of a 9-volt battery that has been sitting for a while, you might find some leakage in one or more of the internal power cells, but the chances of leakage outside of the outer casing are pretty minor. There is a great explanation of all of this including pictures at the RF Cafe site here.
I can’t speak for anyone else but, for me, while I do remember to not leave guitars with onboard active electronics plugged in when not in use (but I only learned that after blowing through innumerable batteries that were discharging when the guitar was not being played), if I am not regularly playing the instrument using those electronics, I am far less good about removing the batteries.
The first time I had batteries leak in that Taylor was within a year of buying it. It was still under warranty and I called Taylor and they sent out a replacement battery box/preamp. It’s a pretty simple replacement process. Again, check out the videos for more info. Bottom line is that you take off a faceplate that is held on by pretty weak adhesive and then the entire unit is held in with four screws. The connection to the pickups and controls is a standard RJ-45 (i.e., Ethernet) connector. Replacing it was a 10 minute job.
A couple of months ago, I pulled the Taylor out of the case for the first time in a few years to do some tracking with it and… Yep. You guessed it. Leakage had occurred again. Which is where this whole repair journey really begins.
I started looking online for a replacement battery box. Turns out that there are two versions of the AA version. The original ES1 and something called an ES1.3. I only figured that out when I saw a note about replacing the box on the Taylor web site which stated that if you were trying to make the replacement on an ES1 guitar and the connector was different, that you had the wrong part and to contact Taylor. So I narrowed my search to specifically ES1 battery box units and came up empty. There was a single instance of someone selling one on reverb.com but they made a point of saying it was rare and used and they wanted 100 bucks for it. Plus there was the inconvenient fact that the listing was old and the unit had been sold a long time ago.
So I finally reached out to Taylor. And I was really way less than pleased to be told that it was no longer possible to purchase the ES1 version of the part and that my options were limited to taking the guitar to a Taylor dealer who would upgrade it to the ES1.3 for $300 or send it to the Taylor HQ shop where they would update it to the ES2 9-volt system (i.e., the way it should have been designed in the first place) for $350 plus shipping.
I was not happy with those options. Being an unemployed loser at this point in my life, $300 for the intermediate upgrade or more like $500 for the 9-volt version by the time shipping was figured in was just not in the Realm of the Doable. I told the nice customer service rep on the other end of my email that I was not pleased and that he needed to escalate this. Which he did.
The customer service manager initially stuck to the $300 or $500 options and told me that the issue was likely not the badly corroded battery enclosure but that it was more likely the preamp or even the pickups themselves. This was a mistake.
What he did not know is that I had found a video online showing a luthier by the name of Mitch Pearson demonstrating how he had repaired the same system. So I had an idea as to the issue.
I tried the method Mitch shows and was not successful. The terminals where the wires connect were so damaged that one of them broke off the second I touched it with the soldering iron.
I got back to the Taylor rep (a lovely guy by the name of Glen) and was, big surprise for those who know me, maybe a bit of a dick.
“Let’s get something straight,” I wrote. “I’m not a moron and I know how to use a multimeter. I’ve already tested and confirmed that there is no continuity between the battery box and the preamp.” That did, however, change the tenor of the conversation. He came back and told me that I could order a 1.3 battery box. “It’s not a direct replacement,” he wrote. “But you can swap out the guts (i.e., the circuit board that hosts the power supply and preamp) from your ES1 and put it into the ES1.3 replacement and that would get you a brand new battery box.” Total cost for that part: 60 bucks including shipping.
Sold.
Again, there are a couple of videos outlining all of the steps I took. When I got everything soldered and reinstalled and plugged it in and heard the beginning hints of maybe some feedback, I knew we had Success.
I gotta question the cost I was quoted by Taylor. What I did involved removing four screws from the guitar and unplugging the preamp, then swapping out the circuit boards and soldering two wires and putting everything back together. The hardest part, honestly, was getting the strap pin loose from the preamp. It is a simple screw-on connection but they must use some kind of adhesive like Loc-Tite because it did *not* want to release. Even if there is no retail markup in the price of the part, that means the dealer would make $240 for what is basically a 15-minute job that anyone who can use a soldering iron can do easily. The $350 from the factory is a little more understandable as the size and shape difference between the AA battery box and the 9-volt replacement is gonna mean doing some routing to remove additional wood from the foot of the guitar. That is a skill level that should be more expensive.
Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I should back up on that. Truth is that I have no idea how a shop would approach this and it’s more likely that they would modify the wiring connection so that the pickups and controls could connect directly to the new circuit board. (I think I forgot to mention it but the most obvious difference between the ES1 circuit board and the ES1.3 version is that the connector has been changed out.) This fix that I opted for is a bit of a Mickey Mouse option. Plus there is the whole issue that Electric Shop as a required class in junior high school stopped being a thing probably 40 years ago and the percentage of people under the age of 50 who have ever even seen a soldering iron is probably no more than maybe 5%. Tops.
But it works.
And, by doing it myself, I saved $240. But, for me, being able to figure out and fix stuff is about a lot more than just the money. Although, having that ability and a certain recklessness about what I am willing to try to fix has saved me and my family thousands of dollars over the years. I know this marks me as hopelessly old, but there is a huge sense of satisfaction that I get every time I successfully fix something. It’s a feeling I really enjoy.
That’s it. I’m gonna track a couple of acoustic parts now. Well, as soon as I finish editing that video. C-ya around campus.