Oil City: 1955 hofner pickup restoration

OilCityPickups

Most of what I do all day is make new pickups ... Oil City and ASL ... but sometimes something cool and old comes in to be restored ... and I like to share :-)

This is a lovely old pickup made for Hofner between 1955 and 1957. Sadly it had suffered major damp damage, and was full of corrosion and dead as a dodo!


The coil in this sort of pickup is an 'air coil' wound without a bobbin ... originally on a wire basket affair in a lathe chuck. After winding the coil was tied at three points with cotton then wrapped in plain old sellotape ... no potting.
Below is my two part 'dummy bobbin' made just for doing these Hofner coils.




aAnd above ... the pickup rewound. I stuck to the fifties German method right up to the tape wrapping ... where I used much tougher modern cloth tape.The pickup will receive a very light wax potting to 'seat everything together nicely ... and make it usable on the lovely old jazz box it came off of. Not enough to deaden the tone ... just stop the worst of the squeal these units are renown for.

Doing this sort of job gives you a real feel for the era and production methods ... and lets some nice old kit get used again.

GSPBASSES

Hi @TheGuitarWeasel seeing as you seem to like restoring old things that don’t work any more would you like to have a go at repairing this. Its a Gibson H/B out of my “V” 90 one coil dose not work.

OilCityPickups

I'll take a look at anything me ... give me a PM :-)

jpfamps

TheGuitarWeasel said:

Most of what I do all day is make new pickups ... Oil City and ASL ... but sometimes something cool and old comes in to be restored ... and I like to share :-)

This is a lovely old pickup made for Hofner between 1955 and 1957. Sadly it had suffered major damp damage, and was full of corrosion and dead as a dodo!


The coil in this sort of pickup is an 'air coil' wound without a bobbin ... originally on a wire basket affair in a lathe chuck. After winding the coil was tied at three points with cotton then wrapped in plain old sellotape ... no potting.
Below is my two part 'dummy bobbin' made just for doing these Hofner coils.




aAnd above ... the pickup rewound. I stuck to the fifties German method right up to the tape wrapping ... where I used much tougher modern cloth tape.The pickup will receive a very light wax potting to 'seat everything together nicely ... and make it usable on the lovely old jazz box it came off of. Not enough to deaden the tone ... just stop the worst of the squeal these units are renown for.

Doing this sort of job gives you a real feel for the era and production methods ... and lets some nice old kit get used again.

Top job!

That's from a friend of mines guitar, and we will be sorting the electrics out next week, so I will report back.

OilCityPickups

Cool! Well I have bunged the pickup to as close the original spec as I can, and hope the charge in the magnets is still good enough!

ICBM

Nice job - even the "incorrect" modern tape actually looks more 'vintage' somehow!

Isn't the problem with these pickups that the wire coating produces an acid when it decays over time, which then eats through the wire? So they're all destined to die eventually.

I certainly see an almost endless number of dead old Hofner pickups.

OilCityPickups

You are right about the number of dead Hofner pickups and the reason ... mind you this pickup even earlier than most you will see. The crudity of the design is breathtaking!!! The wire in the air coil seemed to have gone hopelessly brittle with age ... and I had a real job getting a 'ten turn' length out whole to measure for diameter (wrapped around a screwdriver shaft). The later 'screw and staple' humbuckers corrode through their 'pigtail' wires which are insulated only by a thin layer of green paint!
My advice to you if you have a nice old Hofner pickup: DON'T DESTURB IT! It will almost certainly peg out if taken out or messed about with. Luckily later ones a doddle to rewind.
Interestingly the next most common pickup to die for no real reason is the Rickenbacker HiGain bass unit ... I rewind nearly as many of those as Hofners! The usual problem there is that the coil centre connection is simply the raw 44awg wire soldered directly to the tip of a sawn off brass screw! No shock or strain relief ... and no potting to stabilise the parts.

Antique_Guitars

Nice looking pickup, I really love those odd looking things!

OilCityPickups

I'm lucky enough to work on quite a few lovely, old pickups. From fifties Fenders and Gibsons, to the more unusual like DeArmond ...and now I see a fair few early British and Japanese units too. I always make extensive notes, and many of the findings feed back into my modern pickup production.