Checking phase of 2 conductor HB coils

['59]

Good morning,

I am experimenting on coil swapping two squier humbuckers just to learn how to do it. Is there a way to check the phase of a humbucker coil with a multimeter seeing as I don't have the luxury of fixing phase issues with a 4 conductor?

 

[larryguitar]

A 'bare' HB coil doesn't have a phase; it's got a start and finish to its coil. It has to be combined with another coil to have a phase, and you control that when wiring the coils together; start-to-start will be in phase, start-to-end will be out of phase.

Larry

 

[jeremy]

yep. and you can usually tell which are the start and finish wires once you are looking at the coil itself, though not always

 

['59]

One of the pickups looks like the signal goes in the first coil through a red wire, out a black wire, into the next through a black wire, and out with a red wire. The second one I can't really tell which is which, But it looks like it should be the same except it has a green wire instead of a red wire.

The trick with testing to see whether the DCR raises or drops when touching it with a screwdriver doesn't seem to work on humbuckers.

 

[Chistopher]

I won't swear to it, but you know the trick where you hold you play music on your phone and hold it up to your pickups and it amplifies it through your speaker? It would stand to reason that if the coils are out of phase it would sound thin.

Also if you are going to get into modding coils are winding pickups, it would be worth it to solder some alligator clips to your output jack to facilitate easier testing