3 Wire pickup readings don't make sense (INF Ibanez)

[Masta' C]

https://ibanez.fandom.com/wiki/Infinity_pickups

[GuitarDoc]

https://ibanez.fandom.com/wiki/Infinity_pickups

According to that info, all of the INF humbuckers have 4 conductor wires. That only confirms my suspicion that the OP has a pup that was somehow moded by a previous owner (who may not have known what he was doing) and until we can actually see how the coil wires have been soldered to the lead wires we will have no clue as to how it ended up.

Top-L...ball's in your corner.

[Top-L]

I opened the pickup and figured out what was wrong.

My cheap (analog) multimeter has a manual calibration for Ohms resistance. I thought it was a fine adjustment, but its a gross adjustment and needs to be calibrated against something. I didn't even know there was this adjustment until I started testing other pickups (which were giving unexpected results), then saw the red dial on the side.

Regarding the pickup, I did open it up. The red wire is the coil tap. Its wired as expected. Two of the wires are combined internally and go to the red wire.

The readings were inexplicable, not only because of the calibration issue, but because I was using the wrong scale. I used the wrong scale because the multimeter was so improperly calibrated that using the correct scale was not giving numbers that were the correct order of magnitude. My eyesight is not good enough to read the fine print on the dial. My digital multimeter that I normally use needs a fuse.

"Top-L...ball's in your corner."

This is an ibanez pickup with three wires. There is also an unused SC middle pickup in the set, and I believe they did this to simplify factory wiring with the ibanez 5-way; there was never any intent to run the pickups in parallel, only coil tap them to work in conjunction with the center SC. There were probably 2-wire and 4-wire versions as well.

Since starting this thread, I reinstalled the Evolution in the guitar and again confirmed that its the wrong pickup for this guitar. Its just too beamy and focused. The guitar has a strong upper mid focus and the Evolution doubles down on that and makes it "icepicky".

My next step is to swap a ceramic mag into the INF2 to get more output, and this allowed me to open the pickup and run these tests.

The INF1 in the neck is pretty excellent, I actually prefer it to the SD Jazz, BUT it has an annoying property of sounding slightly out of phase with the INF2 bridge pickup in the middle position. It sounds perfectly fine with the Evolution in the bridge. Again, based on the Ibanez design, it was always intended to be used with a middle SC and there was never any intent to run it combined with the bridge. They probably tuned the coils to sound nearly identical and there is some low end frequency cancellation when combined. I have read of another person reporting this problem with these pickups wired together.

The INF2 that I opened up has a rough A5. People have reported its a better pickup with a ceramic mag. Its a mid scoop A5 pickup that is EQ for metal, but its not hot enough for most metal. The ceramic magnet gives it some mids and more output. I'm in the process of making the swap to ceramic.

The SD Custom 5 that came with the guitar is the "right idea", but I still prefer the stock INF2 with A5 to it. It has more output and more bass. I suspect the INF set was designed to sound good in cheap metal guitars.

[Masta' C]

According to that info, all of the INF humbuckers have 4 conductor wires.

No, many had 3-wire just as the OP's have. Largely depended on which model guitar they were going into. The page I posted shows the approximate DCR of each pickup, with the INF2 being 16K, so two readings ~8K is expected. I wouldn't worry about the alleged 5K reading in this case, it's likely erroneous.

[Top-L]

No, many had 3-wire just as the OP's have. Largely depended on which model guitar they were going into. The page I posted shows the approximate DCR of each pickup, with the INF2 being 16K, so two readings ~8K is expected. I wouldn't worry about the alleged 5K reading in this case, it's likely erroneous.

Check my post above. There was an error with my use of the multimeter. I too thought that 8+8=16 made sense, but actually the calibration of the multimeter was way off.

BTW, the INF set with the magnets reversed rocks!!!

There are alot of similarities between the A5 and ceramic, but the ceramic gives it a bit more output, a bit more mids, and smooths the top. The INF2 with ceramic is sounding like a very legit lead guitar pickup. And the INF1 with A5 in the neck, is more versatile and sounds along the lines of an Air Norton. The weird "phase" issue in the middle position has also gone away, I suspect because the pickups are more different in sound.

[GuitarDoc]

The red wire is the coil tap. Its wired as expected. Two of the wires are combined internally and go to the red wire.

So then it's NOT a "coil tap" after all. It's a coil split wire.