My project involved working on broken guitar pickups. Now, I don't want to take credit for thinking up the idea for this. I read about how to do this on the Seymour Duncan users forum. What happened was that a forum member took apart a 59 model pickup and a Custom model pickup. He took a coil from each of them, and put together a pickup combining one coil of the 59, and one coil of the Custom. He then called this pickup, "The 59 Custom."
So I happened to have a broken Seymour Duncan Custom pickup, and a Dimarzio FRED pickup. However, I was lucky in that, I had a working slug side of the Custom. The Dimarzio FRED has adjustable pole pieces on both sides, and one of the sides was still working.
So I decided to make a new pickup by combining both working coils. This sounds easy, but there are a few steps. First I had to figure out the start and stop of each coil. Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio have different color codes so I had to keep them straight.
I'll go over this next part pretty quick, but I had to work with some very fine wires, and make sure I didn't burn up the coil windings. I also used some heat shrink tubing to protect the where the wires came off the pickup and connected to outgoing wires. That worked really well. I also bought some cloth tape from Stew-Mac to wrap around the pickup. That was one of my better purchases.
I also changed the hex screws on the Dimarzio coil to Phillips head screws. The hex screws were extremely rusted. I also used a polished Alnico 2 bar magnet. Here's what it looked like after I attached all the wires and put the pickup back together.
I have blue tape over the slug side because I was about to put the cover on. When the slug pole pieces touch a cover you can sometimes get microphonics/feedback. Here's the view with the cover on.
Now, I haven't soldered the pickup to the cover for a reason. I wanted to see how it sounded first. But how do I do that without actually installing it in a guitar. Well, there is a quick and hilarious way to do that. First, I ran the wire directly to an output jack.
As you can see I then ran it to a cable that ran to my amplifier. I then took one of my guitars and laid it down on my workbench. Next I did this.
That's right, I held the pickup over the strings while strumming them. That way I could move the pickup to the neck, middle, and bridge positions, and see how it sounded. I have to say, it was pretty awesome. I'll admit, I couldn't get a detailed or exact sound out of it. But the fact that I managed to make this thing work made me do the happy dance.
I know I said I wouldn't get technical, but I will list some specs just in case someone stumbles across this article, and wishes to know them.
Seymour Duncan Custom slug side DC resistance: 7.07K ohms. (43 AWG wire.)
Dimarzio FRED screw side DC resistance: 5.65K ohms. (43 AWG wire.)
Total DC resistance: 12.72K ohms.
Polished Alnico 2 magnet from All-Star Magnetics.
Seymour Duncan nickel/silver baseplate.
Standard Seymour Duncan wiring schematic.
I will soon actually install this in an Epiphone Les Paul. I'm really excited to test this pickup out in a Les Paul. I'm still ecstatic that I actually managed to get this pickup working. Nevermind that I spent an hour and a half carefully dissecting and sewing two pickups into one. Actually, for my first attempt, I don't think that's too long. I kind of expected it to take longer.
One important thing I do want to say is that, I did my homework before I took these pickups apart. This chart from Guitar Electronics helped immensely.
I had a custom diagram drawn out so that I would know which wire coming off the pickup was attached to which color coordinated wire that would go to the electronics. That was extremely helpful so I didn't have to think about it every other second. I just wrote it down so I could concentrate on being very careful with my soldering.
I have to say, it's a lot of work, but it is rewarding. I'm really interested in rewinding my own pickups. I'd say this is a good start to that. Again, I feel great about the way this turned out. I hope to have some more projects like this in the future.
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