Oil City Pickups: waking up an older Fender humbucker

OilCityPickups

Always like to let folks see when interesting rewinds come in, espescially when they are an unusual design or make an interesting point. This ticks both boxes.

This is a 17k double cream bobbin pickup ... I believe from an 'offset' model. It came in with one dead coil, and no obvious duff solder joints. The construction is a little quirky, and a total pain to work on ....

As such there are no 'keeper bars' or pole shoes as some call them ... the bobbins have molded 'turrets' that contain short metal pins. these pins have the start and finish wires soldered to them directly, and protrude through the baseplate. The collar flange spaces the coil to the magnet width, but leaves tons of fresh air under the bobbins. It's also a pig soldering to the pins melts the bobbin VERY easily!

The design seems to have caused a rather banana shaped baseplate in this instance!

After the bobbins have been removed we see why one coil died ... someone clearly had been messing and slipped with a screwdriver. Let this be a cautionary tale ... open coil pickups and sharp tools don't mix ... don't mess unless you know what you are doing and are super careful!

Here it is rewound ... it has been potted in our two stage potting process we use with all high output humbuckers: first the coils are soaked with no tape wrapping, then carefully dried and taped ... then the pickup is assembled and a second potting process fixes all the components for no squeal.

And a Fender bucker lives again :-)