Oil City Pickups ... a trio of old Hofner rewinds 'Oh joy'

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OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
My heart always sinks a little when I get a Hofner 'staple' humbucker to rewind ... imagine my feelings getting three of the buggers ... all pretty much dead as dodos at one hit :-) 
For those who don't know, the 'Staple humbucker fitted to many Hofner 60s semi acoustics, (and in this case a Hofner Galaxy solid)
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are notorious for dying at the slightest disturbance. If you have an old Hofner guitar with these pickups and they are working DON'T disturb them in any way ... if you so much as take the pickup out to look at the back or wiring, chances are it will stop working.
The reasons for this are mostly in the cheap wire with no proper insulstion used to make the 'pigtails' to the winding wire ... more about this as we progress.
Here we have the sad and sorry pickups
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Complete with tarnished covers, bodged and taped hookup wires, and a generous dose of corrosion apparent on the poles ... and dead as dodos.
I checked the polarity of these before stripping them and found an anomaly ... the pickup with the cable splice seemed to have a flipped magnet compared to the other two ... odd ... and leads me to believe it might have been taken from another Hofner guitar at some point in the Galaxy's life.imageimage
 
There is no way to describe the smell inside an old pickup ... an unpleasant mix of mold, chemical reaction, beer and cigarette smoke comes to mind ... funky! image
The thin brown 'pigtail' wires are the reason these pickups die ... they seem to be simply twisted bare wire coated with some form of lacquer ... that is crumbling and exposing the core. Because the connection to the centre of the bobbin ... the start wire ... is made like this, as soon as it fails there is no way to reconnect the start wire without totally rewinding the bobbin.
Not one of the six bobbins in the three pickups was reading right ... so all six would need re winding. In any case taking off the pickup cover to wind one coil inevatably leads to the other going 'open circuit ... they are that delicate!

More on the strip and rebuild shortly




Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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Comments

  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    tFB Trader
    One bobbin stripped and the other awaiting stripping. The 43awg wire it was wound with was coverd with a light oxidized powdery gunk and probably shorting in multiple places too.image
    Luckily the magnets on these old Hofner units never seem to give trouble ...
    When I strip an old pickup I unwind a bit by hand to get a 'turn per layer' count and to check the winding tension ... these pickups were wound pretty loose but very regularly, so I will feed the data into the workshop computer, and program 'Tweedle Dee' one of my workshop CNC winding machines to accurately replicate the wind. I don't use CNC for every type of pickup, but on some it is definitely the best way to copy old machine winding.
    Vintage Fender pickups were wound with a hand wire feed ... the operators fingers ... it gave them their characteristic sound. Old Gibsons and many other makes were wound with automatic wire feeding ... so that's how I rewind them, but with the winder running a 'script' that duplicates the patterns of those old machines. The secret is in the programming!

    image
    Tweedle Dee gets stuck in filling the old bobbin ... with a a slow speed seeting and manual 'tweaking' to get the bobbin just like the original

    More soon 
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    tFB Trader
    The hookup wires were well shot ... so I took the opportunity to replace them using twin core and ground cable. This was a cunning ploy on my part, as it allowed me to retain the flipped magnet in one pickup ... and still enable the customer to wire all the pickups in electrical phase. Something the old galaxy probably hadn't benefited from in many years!image
    Now to wire it all upimage
    And with all the connections made, the pigtails tucked away neatly, and some Toyo tape keeping the bobbins together
    I will spare you 'repeat all steps three times' ... it took most part of a day in the workshop ... but was worth it for ...image
    Three shiny, good as new 'staple' pickups ... covers cleaned with a gentle auto 'scratch clear' polish ... and ready to rock and roll for another 40 years plus!
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    tFB Trader
    I should end this with 'and now they have whisked themselves off to a Galaxy far far away ...' Well Croydon actually ...
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • MegiiMegii Frets: 1670
    Nice to see these being restored with such care and attention to detail. It does sound to me like some of these old pickup types were not all that brilliantly designed or made, at least in some respects, but I guess they do have a certain sound, and are part of guitar history - I like how you respect that, and the important details that need to be done right.
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  • rsvmarkrsvmark Frets: 1373
    I love these kinds of threads. Great stuff
    An official Foo liked guitarist since 2024
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  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    tFB Trader
    Megii said:
    Nice to see these being restored with such care and attention to detail. It does sound to me like some of these old pickup types were not all that brilliantly designed or made, at least in some respects, but I guess they do have a certain sound, and are part of guitar history - I like how you respect that, and the important details that need to be done right.
    Europe in the 50s and early 60s wasn't a place to either get information on pickup manufacture ... access to good quality materials ... or even access to US pickups to copy. I have a lot of time for those early pioneering manufacturers ... they produced some nice sounding pickups.
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • FelineGuitarsFelineGuitars Frets: 11494
    tFB Trader
    I should end this with 'and now they have whisked themselves off to a Galaxy far far away ...' Well Croydon actually ...
    Arrived safely - I just have to find time to get them back into the old Hofner and get the rest of it working ok 

    Many guitars have a re-sale value. Some you'll never want to sell.
    Stockist of: Earvana & Graphtech nuts, Faber Tonepros & Gotoh hardware, Fatcat bridges. Highwood Saddles.

    Pickups from BKP, Oil City & Monty's pickups.

      Expert guitar repairs and upgrades - fretwork our speciality! www.felineguitars.com.  Facebook too!

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  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    edited December 2015 tFB Trader
    My first decent guitar was a Hofner President Florentine ... which came to me at the tender age of 17 ... with guess what ... dead pickups. Not being a pickup winder at the time, I converted it to standard humbuckers ... my idol at the time was Ted Nugent ... and I whacked a pair of DiMarzio super distortions in! It actually sounded awesome but was a crime against humanity. An old friend of mine still has the guitar now sporting a pair of my own humbucker sized P90s filling the big holes I carved in the top all those years ago!

    image
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • MegiiMegii Frets: 1670
    Megii said:
    Nice to see these being restored with such care and attention to detail. It does sound to me like some of these old pickup types were not all that brilliantly designed or made, at least in some respects, but I guess they do have a certain sound, and are part of guitar history - I like how you respect that, and the important details that need to be done right.
    Europe in the 50s and early 60s wasn't a place to either get information on pickup manufacture ... access to good quality materials ... or even access to US pickups to copy. I have a lot of time for those early pioneering manufacturers ... they produced some nice sounding pickups.
    Cheers for clarifying - I guess I hadn't taken that into account, and no disrespect intended to those early manufacturers.
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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71950
    Bear in mind that Hofner and the other German makers of the 50s and up to the early 60s were operating in the aftermath of the most devastating war in history, that left most of German industry in ruins and needing to be rebuilt from scratch. OK, in the end that stood them in good stead because it enabled them to modernise more effectively, but at the time it was a huge disadvantage compared to the US or even Britain.

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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  • OilCityPickupsOilCityPickups Frets: 9978
    tFB Trader
    Really the Hofners of the 50s and early Sixties were remarkably high quality, and I would stack a good one up against most of their trans Atlantic competition. I was playing rock on my Hofner Presedent ... cos I couldn't afford a Gibson. 
    Professional pickup winder, horse-testpilot and recovering Chocolate Hobnob addict.
    Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups  ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message  

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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71950
    edited December 2015
    Really the Hofners of the 50s and early Sixties were remarkably high quality, and I would stack a good one up against most of their trans Atlantic competition. I was playing rock on my Hofner Presedent ... cos I couldn't afford a Gibson. 
    Yes - better than the average Gretsch usually, even if not quite in Gibson and Guild territory.

    I wish I'd kept the Hofner President I learned to repair guitars with! Bizarrely I saw it again only a couple of years ago - I recognised it straight away even though it had been refinished again because of some distinctive changes - on stage with a young band, and it sounded fantastic. Fitted with some Antoria (Maxon) humbuckers if I remember right.

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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