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)
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
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.
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! 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
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Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
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Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
"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
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
"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