DiMarzio ID

TimmyO · December 2023

Prompted by the other thread about fakes, can I get a view on this please?

OilCityPickups · December 2023

It's appears to be a Super Distortion, not an early one as it has triangle feet, four conductor wiring (early ones were braided like Gibson pickups), is stamped DP100 and has Phillips bobbin screws rather than the brass slot heads the originals had. Mid to late 80s I'd suggest ... maybe later.
Still a good pickup mind.

TimmyO · December 2023

Ta. iirc it was sold to me as “70s” - I think I paid 30-40 for it about 15 years ago

I had it in an Explorer-shaped thing I built wired direct to the volume knob. The guitar always turned ears (if not heads)

OilCityPickups · December 2023

I believe the cutoff point for square feet was about 1980 ... though of course with factories there would have been some overlap time.

RobG3294 · December 2023

OilCityPickups said:

It's appears to be a Super Distortion, not an early one as it has triangle feet, four conductor wiring (early ones were braided like Gibson pickups), is stamped DP100 and has Phillips bobbin screws rather than the brass slot heads the originals had. Mid to late 80s I'd suggest ... maybe later.
Still a good pickup mind.

It's a fake. DP100? Danish Pete wasn't even alive when this pickup is purported to be made.

TimmyO said:

Ta. iirc it was sold to me as “70s” - I think I paid 30-40 for it about 15 years ago

I had it in an Explorer-shaped thing I built wired direct to the volume knob. The guitar always turned ears (if not heads)

On a more serious note - the mid/late 70s four conductor ones (although they were really only a four conductor through the braid) were called the dual sound not the SD, which was purely a two conductor gavitt hookup as Oil City says. So yeh it's 80s at best.

splitable 70s DiMarzio did not have that wiring colour scheme either - I think you're piddling in the wind trying to nail it down to a year. But it's not 70s I'm afraid, baseplate looks absolutely genuine so it's a kosha pickup in itself.

OilCityPickups · December 2023

RobG3294 said:

OilCityPickups said:

It's appears to be a Super Distortion, not an early one as it has triangle feet, four conductor wiring (early ones were braided like Gibson pickups), is stamped DP100 and has Phillips bobbin screws rather than the brass slot heads the originals had. Mid to late 80s I'd suggest ... maybe later.
Still a good pickup mind.

It's a fake. DP100? Danish Pete wasn't even alive when this pickup is purported to be made.

TimmyO said:

Ta. iirc it was sold to me as “70s” - I think I paid 30-40 for it about 15 years ago

I had it in an Explorer-shaped thing I built wired direct to the volume knob. The guitar always turned ears (if not heads)

On a more serious note - the mid/late 70s four conductor ones (although they were really only a four conductor through the braid) were called the dual sound not the SD, which was purely a two conductor gavitt hookup as Oil City says. So yeh it's 80s at best.

splitable 70s DiMarzio did not have that wiring colour scheme either - I think you're piddling in the wind trying to nail it down to a year. But it's not 70s I'm afraid, baseplate looks absolutely genuine so it's a kosha pickup in itself.

Like I say nice pickup anyway ... :-)

CasperCaster · December 2023

OilCityPickups said:

I believe the cutoff point for square feet was about 1980 ... though of course with factories there would have been some overlap time.

Late '82 or early '83 is generally quoted as the cut-off for square feet. I used to spend a lot of time on one of the Hamer forums, and those guys are obsessive about their early Hamers. There is far more useful information about early Dimarzio pickups there than elsewhere.

CasperCaster · December 2023

RobG3294 said:

On a more serious note - the mid/late 70s four conductor ones (although they were really only a four conductor through the braid) were called the dual sound not the SD, which was purely a two conductor gavitt hookup as Oil City says. So yeh it's 80s at best.

splitable 70s DiMarzio did not have that wiring colour scheme either - I think you're piddling in the wind trying to nail it down to a year. But it's not 70s I'm afraid, baseplate looks absolutely genuine so it's a kosha pickup in itself.

My early square foot Dual Sound is what I jokingly refer to as a 3.5 wire humbucker. As you rightly say the colours don't match the current colour schemes, but the pickups can be wired for series, parallel or split. The main limitation is that you can't flip the phase of the pickup.

CasperCaster · December 2023

OilCityPickups said:

It's appears to be a Super Distortion, not an early one as it has triangle feet, four conductor wiring (early ones were braided like Gibson pickups), is stamped DP100 and has Phillips bobbin screws rather than the brass slot heads the originals had. Mid to late 80s I'd suggest ... maybe later.
Still a good pickup mind.

It's definitely a genuine Super Distortion, and definitely not seventies due to the triangle feet. But based on the type of shielded 4-conductor wire, the 'DP100' stamp on the baseplate and also the two rather than three holes in the top of the bobbins I think it is probably approx mid nineties. I can't remember exactly, but Dimarzio changed the bobbins in the early nineties - possibly '93?

jaymenon · July 1

These days DiMarzio affix a sticky label to the humbucker undersurface indicating which model it is.

At one point they were engraving the model number on the baseplate (like in the pic above). When did they stop doing this?

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