Oil City: Shergold pickup restoration 2. rebuild

OilCityPickups

Right .... that gungy old Shergold pickup is now ready to be rewound and re assembled

Exhibit a. 

a bobbin displaying all the signs of corrosion! Smells foul too!

measured the wire diameter by the tried and trusted method of taking ten turns around a screwdriver, then measuring the width of the 10 turns with a digital vernier ... and dividing by 10! This wire was so corroded and nasty that I ended up taking 20 turns around to get an accurate average!

with .056mm chosen, the old wire was stripped off to reveal a curious and very, very delicate 'cut and shut' bobbin.

 Seems to have been made by sawing down a much taller bobbin and gluing it with something resembling model aircraft glue.

I had to reinforce it with fillets of superglue and make a cradle so that it wouldn't fall apart in the winding machine!

Mounted in 'Tweedle Dee' the winding machine

Continued shortly ....

OilCityPickups

And a rewound bobbin ...

This bobbin was then put aside with it's mate after being taped up and with a small amount of oil based lacquer used on the wire to try and kill microphonics ... the bobbins were simply too delicate for wax dipping.

Next step was to replace the pretty much dead magnet.

No replacements are available of the size and mass of the originals (though I shall be working on getting some made for other Shergold owners in a similar position) so we used some of a much shallower profile but a stronger and more stable material. This required spacers to take up the extra room in the magnet carrier.

The open ends of the magnet and shims were then filled with hot melt glue to again help prevent squeal ... before the bobbins were replaced on to the magnet carrier.

The issue now was that all the corrosion in the pole keeper bars had left the pole screws loose, sure to vibrate and squeal under gain, so I used the old dodge of blowing a tiny amount of superglue onto the female threads and letting it dry ... this packs them enough to tighten the pole screws a bit on the thread :-)

More in a mo ....

OilCityPickups

Pole screws in ... and mounted back on the plastic base. now to clean up the output tag strip a bit ... I hate untidy old solder blobs hanging about.

Even the way the output is handled on this little brute is over engineered to heck.

Even the way the bolts that hold cover and base together are a mini work of art ... tapped down the centre for the height adjustment screws ... brilliant and charming in an old school way.

And so restoration complete ... the Shergold pickup lives to gig again another day. I have nothing but admiration for the British engineers who built this pickup. With practically nothing off the shelves available in the way of parts, they created a beautifully made and original sounding pickup pretty much from scratch.

impmann

And it's back in its original home!

Ash has done an incredible job on a practically irreplaceable pickup. It sounds exactly 'right' - just like a Shergold should - and its squeal free!!

I'm so grateful and impressed.

Thanks, Ash!!

martinw

Nice work.

OilCityPickups

martinw said:

Nice work.

That's a serious compliment coming from you geezer!

OilCityPickups

impmann said:

And it's back in its original home!

Ash has done an incredible job on a practically irreplaceable pickup. It sounds exactly 'right' - just like a Shergold should - and its squeal free!!

I'm so grateful and impressed.

Thanks, Ash!!

Delighted the pickup is back in service ... such a lovely bit of old British design deserves to be cherished for lots of years to come.

martinw

TheGuitarWeasel said:

martinw said:

Nice work.

That's a serious compliment coming from you geezer!

Give over!

Your repair threads are always fascinating, but this one goes above and beyond. I can't imagine doing this kind of thing makes much financial sense, but it's great to see what can be saved.

ThePrettyDamned

Good lord, what a fascinating thread! I forget that everything was us made once and spares were a rarity...

OilCityPickups

martinw said:

TheGuitarWeasel said:

martinw said:

Nice work.

That's a serious compliment coming from you geezer!

Give over!

Your repair threads are always fascinating, but this one goes above and beyond. I can't imagine doing this kind of thing makes much financial sense, but it's great to see what can be saved.

It is not at all profitable in the financial sense ... but in the research and development sense it is priceless. Pulling old kit apart and finding out what makes it sound the way it does is as relevant for a pickup maker as an amp maker :-)

We as winders are at a disadvantage in that people never thought to note down any values or measurements when they built classic pickups ... amp designers, I think, were perhaps more practical!

So much of what I learn feeds into new products that I consider it time well spent ... I am an obscessive note taker.

meltedbuzzbox

great work!!

I cant wait to check the out in the flesh next time I a over Tim's gaff

ICBM

That's a really thoughtful, thorough job you've done there.

Someone I know will be in touch shortly about another interesting 1970s pickup, if they haven't been already! A Kramer humbucker sadly killed by the stupidity of a former owner or "repairer" taking out the bobbin mounting screws, so the coils have rattled around and broken their wires.

OilCityPickups

They've been in touch ... it's in my workshop ... and being sorted ... pics to follow

ICBM

Excellent. I have no idea why the bobbin screws were taken out - and they must have been, they couldn't have worked loose by themselves and they weren't in the guitar cavity - because the casing rivets were still in place when I looked at it so it obviously hadn't been fully dismantled. Maybe they thought that was how you take the cover off... I don't know.

It's great to have someone here in the UK who really cares about these old less conventional designs and wants to fix them properly, instead of just ripping them out and fitting something standard/ordinary.

OilCityPickups

My penance for all the pickups I ripped out and fitted Super Distortions in the 1970s! 

jpfamps

TheGuitarWeasel said:

martinw said:

TheGuitarWeasel said:

martinw said:

Nice work.

That's a serious compliment coming from you geezer!

Give over!

Your repair threads are always fascinating, but this one goes above and beyond. I can't imagine doing this kind of thing makes much financial sense, but it's great to see what can be saved.

It is not at all profitable in the financial sense ... but in the research and development sense it is priceless. Pulling old kit apart and finding out what makes it sound the way it does is as relevant for a pickup maker as an amp maker :-)

We as winders are at a disadvantage in that people never thought to note down any values or measurements when they built classic pickups ... amp designers, I think, were perhaps more practical!

So much of what I learn feeds into new products that I consider it time well spent ... I am an obscessive note taker.

It's also good to be able to restore and old piece of gear without hacking it up by installing the wrong pickup.