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Most of you are used to seeing my pickup designs as fully completed ‘pickup porn’ like the above shot of my Tele ‘Twang 90’ … but I’ve intended for quite a while to do a series of posts about the nuts and bolts pickup design and repair. Not only because some of you nut-cases want to try your hand at winding pickups yourself, but also to give you a bit of confidence in performing the common pickup repair, maintenance and even improvement jobs that many of you think might too difficult.
I’m going to kick off with how to improve your cheap, Chinese made humbuckers by 100% for under a tenner for the pair. It’ll be fun, and give you a real sense of achievement to be dabbling in the dark arts of pickup science. Most of us have this sort of pickup kicking around in a drawer somewhere … I’m going to make this one work for its money!
Today I plan to convert a cheap neck pickup into an acceptable PAF clone by removing the horrible, skinny hookup wire and putting in some vintage style braided cable (I will cover conversion to 4 conductor in another post) … and most important … binning that nasty ceramic magnet and putting in a nice alnico 4 … for some BK style PAF action. I could just as easily used alnico 2 for … er … Slashier tones … or alnico 5 for more cut.
Here’s the subject for our Frankenstein’s lab experiments.
The first thing to do is open her up. For removing chrome covers some recommend using a Dremel or similar, equipped with a 1” cut-off wheel to ‘slice through the solder. The theory being that if you use a soldering Iron, you need to use more heat to remove the solder than was used to apply it in the first place … so you risk damaging the pickup’s internals. Personally,I find that using a big, powerful soldering iron lets you put lots of heat into a small space really quickly and can actually minimise the risk of damage. I use an el-cheapo 100w beast from e bay that was £9.99 if I remember correctly. It’s a brute … but has removed and soldered dozens of covers and is still going strong. The other cover removal tool I use is an old 50s table knife … though a narrow stainless kitchen spatula would do.
A swift heat of the solder blob … and the knife is slid in to ‘cut’ the molten solder. Make sure your iron is really hot and you have tinned the tip a little.
Carefully slide off the cover and voila … the guts revealed.
First we’re going to remove that magnet. I loosen but I don’t usually remove the four bobbin screws, at this stage, instead I gently ‘wiggle’ the bobbins to break the seal of potting wax that’s holding in the offending part. I carefully push out the ceramic magnet and consign it to the bin …
A nice shiny alnico 4 magnet. There are several of suppliers of these on line … and even on e bay.
One problem you may encounter is that ceramic magnets are physically thicker than alnicos … so the spacer that keeps the ‘slug’ side bobbin level when you tighten the bobbin screws, may now be too thick. No such problem here … the Artics are so cheap and cheerful they don’t even have spacers! Here I’ve cut a new spacer from some scrap maple (exactly what Gibson used).
We have to make sure we replace the new magnet in the same polarity as the original … so here you will need a cheap compass … or as I’m using here, a Stew-Mac polarity tester. The magnets north pole should point to the ‘screw’ pole pieces in a PAF design.
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Comments
I've temporarily detached all the wires to solder the braid of the hookup cable to the pickup base ‘lip’, leaving enough core wire to reach to the middle of the two bobbins and tuck neatly out of the way once soldered. Here I've used my 40w needle nosed soldering station iron ... rather than the 100w brute.
Oh, for those who don’t know … here’s the proper way to separate the centre wire from the braid on hookup cables … and no you don’t unpick it all!
Right connections made … and some cloth tape used to insulate the joins.
Ends will be tucked in neatly … and a little more cloth tape used to keep things neat. By the way my cloth tape is old fashioned motorbike ‘loom’ tape … exactly what Leo used in the old days.
I’ve dunked the pickup cover in boiling water to remove any excess wax, and filed off any excess solder that might stop the sides of the cover from sitting neatly into place. I will also back out the pole screws a little to guide the cover neatly into the right place. You may notice, the tape on the screw bobbin is new … I couldn’t resist opening the coil up and taking a couple of hundred turns off the bobbin to unbalance the coils. This gives a more open, sparkling tone … and doesn’t noticeably affect the hum cancelling performance.
… back on with the cover … in this case the original cheap brass one … but I could gave fitted a nice pure nickel one from stock.
Clamped into place a swift blob of solder from out 100w gun … and the pickup’s all ready for potting
if you want …. I’ll wax lyrical about that next time (erggggguuuhhh)
Future episodes: A potting we will go and ….. The toughest rewind in history?
Ash
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
I’m going to kick off with how to improve your cheap, Chinese made humbuckers by 100% for under a tenner for the pair
That is tempting ...
Thanks Ash for taking the time to document that.
T(empted)Tony.
Careful and methodical are the watchwords ... I been doing quite a bit of repair and rewind work of late ... and with vintage pickups you literally can't afford slip ups!
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
Instagram
I'm photographing the build of a set of humbucking pickups for a forumite over the next few days to go on here ... and hopefully I'll be cataloging the scratch build of a very unusual pickup shortly.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
Instagram
I have been ridiculously busy over the last few weeks so many of my development projects have had to be put on the back burner. Hopefully it ... and some new humbuckers and Strat options will be ready for broadcasting a bit wider soon!
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
The moral being, don't use a screwdriver, Stanley knife, machete or medieval broadsword to remove your pickup covers!
And yes I made it all better with a complete rewind ... and to a slightly more growly spec.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message