Oil City pickups: vintage Ibanez bass pickup rebuild.

OilCityPickups

The other day this landed on my desk


It's one of the pickups from another very rare beast indeed, an early Ibanez 'Jester' 2030 bass.
I tried to find pictures of one to put up but there are only a handful out there ... most low quality. This is the best I could find:
A weird, mutated Jazz bass kinda thang, but these sorts of instruments are really interesting from a historical and social point of view, as they open a window on the days when people saw Japanese guitars in the same way as we see Chinese instruments these days. This was when the Japanese guitar industry was finding its feet and had few 'clues' as to how things should be made, they just sort of made them to look somewhere near about right, for a very low price point. Some of them are actually really nice players, as Japanese workmanship was pretty good, however there were some right dogs too. By all accounts the guitar this pickup comes from is a really playable one.

Off with the lid ... not soldered on just secured with bent tabs like a Tele neck cover ... and we find a hallmark of most early Japanese pickups ... lots and lots, and LOTS of fresh air!


Above: checking the polarity before accessing the damage.

The 'adjustable' pole pieces are really just for show, as there is a fat ceramic magnet sat in the centre of that bobbin that the bottom of those short screws rest on so you can't adjust them down, and if you were to adjust them up they would no longer be in contact with the magnet! There is no potting of course, nor any earth to the pickup cover (which we will change when we rebuild it) and the whole lot is glued together with some form of UHU style glue! It's actually that glue that seems to have caused the pickup failure, as it has let go at some point ... which would not been so much of an issue had the bobbin not been super thin polystyrene style plastic ... and the glue had not been a solvent! Big whoops there!

Oh very dear me!
I can't stress how bloody paper thin that bobbin is ... and how damaged to hell and back ... er ... and irreplaceable.  

But we have the technology ... we can rebuild him ... showing my age there ;-)

Painstaking work with rayon tape and resin ... essentially building an ultra thin fiberglass splint ... and we have this ...

Yes it's still as fragile as fook ... and I am going to hold my breath rewinding it at a very slow 200 RPM, but at least it's now doable.

And now rewinding ... I swear I sweated buckets winding this ... it took ages due to the low RPM, and I had to stop for at least two cups of tea and a nervous breakdown along the way. 
And its done ... true there is some bobbin flare, but at least the little blighter didn't self destruct half way through!

I fixed the bobbin assembly back to the baseplate using something not solvent based, and reassembled the little beast with a case earth wire (the added thin black wire in the pic below) and the job was a good'un.


An interesting pickup that shares many internal 'features' with the slightly earlier units fitted to guitars like Teiscos. All these pickups are primitive as hell, but many actually make a rather nice noise. This was largely by luck rather than good design, but it goes to show that you don't have to use magnets alloyed with Seth Lover's tears, winding algorithms that would baffle a doctor of mathematics, and hype a mile wide to make magic ... luck and persistence are what counts ... look where Ibanez went with it!