Fragile 5120 wiring harness?
Understanding that the stock wiring harness on the 5120 is installed as a cost-consious design using less expensive components, I'm a little concerned of excess handling of this unit. I'll be replacing pickups first and the entire wiring harness later. But since I'm not keen on doing any un-necessary soldering on, and handling of, a questionable pot, I'm wondering if simply splicing the wires from the pups to the existing wires to and from the pot is an acceptable interim step? I would suspect that the electrons would happily march back and forth through this extra solder joint or two without problem, but I was just wondering if there was another pitfall somewhere else along the way that I'm not thinking of?

No problems then? Didn't really think so. Hope not anyway. If it's out of phase; it should be easy to tell. And I do swing a pretty mean soldering iron! Cool.

From what I've read, that's not the best solution. I don't know all of the specifics, but apparently it weakens the signal slightly. You want to have as few solder connections as possible to get the best sound. That said, in practice, I'm not sure you'll notice a huge sound difference, if it's even audible. And in your case, it might be the best solution. But those crazy audiophiles would tell you to solder it properly.

Solder joints; not a problem! My main concern is damaging a less than ideal pot and its' associated wiring while pulling it through the pick-up slot to do a proper soldering job at the pot itself. The less I can disturb the stock harness, the better. It'll be a stop-gap measure until I can swing a new TV harness a bit later. I'm just trying to avoid any problems with the old harness until the wallet recovers from getting the new guitar and at least one Classic.

I think it is a good idea if you do not want to yank the stock harness out. I would personally pull the stock pots out and solder to them, but the other way is a lot easier. Make sure you protect the "hot" wire from ground and protect the guitar top from solder and flux. Thanks, TV Jones