Oil City Pickups: Travis (has) Bean into Travis Bean

OilCityPickups

On my bench this week I've had a Travis Bean 500 single coil ... dead as a dodo ... and with a badly smashed cover. 
The design of the pickup is interesting as the pickup grounds via the huge machined steel plate on which it sits being in contact with the aluminium neck unit to which it's screwed.


Here you can clearly see the silicone sealing material the cover was glued on with and the huge steel mounting block.

Pickup start wire goes to the baseplate .... 
end wire goes here .... 

The dead coil unwrapped .... 44awg wire ... sadly I don't have any in that rather fetching red ... but hey ho, nobody will see it for a lot more years with a bit of luck.
To be continued ...

earwighoney

As ever a delight to see the insides of a pickup, and thanks for posting. 

Even though I've never played any of the Kramer/TB aluminium neck guitars, IMO they are some of the coolest guitars ever made. 

OilCityPickups

The dead coil revealed ... sadly I don't have 44awg wire in that fetching shade of red ... but nobody will see the naked coil for a a long time ... I hope!
The rather odd wire attachment pins in the bobbin ends. These have no strain relief, so I won't be using them to re attach the start and finish wires.

Rewound ... and with strain relieving 'pigtails' attached. 

Ready to pot in wax ... for the vegans among you, I use pure paraffin wax these days ... no beeswax component. 
Now for that poor abused cover. It looks very musc as if it was damaged in being removed. I can't stress enough, if an old and irreplaceable pickup stops working ... DON'T HAVE A CRACK YOURSELF! Us pickup rewinders are set up to deal with removing covers ... both metal and plastic ... you may cause more damage than was there to start with.

The cover is vacuum -formed polystyrene ... so luckily it can be glued with a solvent style cement.

Steel plate and neodymium magnet ... and some heat from a shrink-tube gun to smooth some of the kinks and ripples in the twisted plastic.
Below: there were some gaps ... so shavings of black styrene were bonded into the cracks. A powerful magnifying glass/lamp unit and tweezers came into play here. A pair of neo magnets kept the cover aligned and flat through the process.


Strain relief and proper insulation both ends ...
And here we go ... the top was carefully (but reversibly) stuck in place with a couple of blobs of hot melt glue .... and hey presto ready to rock on! Yes, it bears honest battle scars, but that cover is solid now.

OilCityPickups

earwighoney said:

As ever a delight to see the insides of a pickup, and thanks for posting. 

Even though I've never played any of the Kramer/TB aluminium neck guitars, IMO they are some of the coolest guitars ever made. 

I'd never actually had my hands on a Travis Bean pickup before, so it was fascinating for me too. 
I had a Kramer for a while ... the only issue I had was at cold gigs where the coefficient of expansion differences between wood and alloy made tuning a bit haphazard till the neck warmed up. 

CasperCaster

Very interesting thread and lovely work - I really enjoy these threads!

OilCityPickups

CasperCaster said:

Very interesting thread and lovely work - I really enjoy these threads!

The next rebuild will involve the worst condition pickups I have ever undertaken! as a taster here's a pic

Pic by Haim Algranati of LA Guitars. 

CasperCaster

Adjustable pole pieces, with the adjusting screws 'paired', and round pole pieces.

Dynasonics?

Or more accurately (from the picture), Dynasonics retrieved from a ship wreck?

OilCityPickups

Yep a pair of Dynasonics ... and all that damage caused by loft storage. Beware folks!

TTony

You know what you're doing really, don't you


As always, thanks for taking the time to take the photos and to share here.

normula1

Fantastic stuff

drwiddly

Really interesting, thanks for posting.

I borrowed a Travis Bean TB1000 for a few months in 1977 (my guitar needed some work and a good friend lent me his. I was in a pro band at the time with a touring schedule). It was an interesting beast - quite bright and zingy but very pokey as well. Good tuning stability but the neck was so cold in the winter!

Megii

Fabulous work fixing that cover.

samzadgan

that looks great. I love how the cover still looks its age post repair

OilCityPickups

samzadgan said:

that looks great. I love how the cover still looks its age post repair

I could have sanded and polished it ... but I think battle scarring on a vintage instrument looks 'right'. Every knock tells a story.