Hybrid building..

B

BloodRose

Professional Scapegoat
I have done bunches of magnet swaps, but am curious of how to make pickup hybrids. I assume you remove the base plate, undo the wires, wire the 2 new halves together and replace mag and base.
Correct?? I wanted to clarify before I go forking up any of my pickups.

Anyone have any pics of the process? Im mostly concerned with getting the 2 coils attached.

Thanks!!
 
Re: Hybrid building..

Pictured are the only connections you need to swap:

16117388_1034874339951687_131036913_n.jpg16117470_1034874283285026_1636396007_n.jpg

1. Remove the covers
2. Remove the screws from the baseplate that secure the slug coil
3. Remove the tape
4. Pry loose the slug coils
5. Desolder or snip the connections pictured
6. Swap the slug coils and replace the same connections
7. Reassemble everything

Here's the Duncan article on it:

http://www.seymourduncan.com/blog/the-tone-garage/how-to-make-a-hybrid-humbucker
 
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Re: Hybrid building..

BloodRose said:
Thanks all!!
Click to expand...

No probz!! What hybrids have you made so far?

I just finished working on my super strat. It finally works right. The neck is an Ant/Seth and the bridge is a JB/C5. I wired the Ant/Seth as 4 conductor. It has a series/split/parallel switch for each hb and bridge pickup on switch. It took me friggin 10 hours to get it to work lol! In the end the only problems were I mixed up start and finish to only 1 coil and the mag orientation. That was it. But I had no idea what was what so I had to check everything like 20 times. It was brutal!

Super Strat.jpg
 
Re: Hybrid building..

BloodRose said:
I have done bunches of magnet swaps, but am curious of how to make pickup hybrids. I assume you remove the base plate, undo the wires, wire the 2 new halves together and replace mag and base.
Correct?? I wanted to clarify before I go forking up any of my pickups.
Click to expand...

At the risk of pissin' off a few folks, soldering isn't as easy as meets the eye. It's an art form. And you're dealing with really tiny wires. I'm not saying you can't do it. But if you don't have a "nice" soldering station, you risk destroying a good pup. YMMV. ;)

Artie
 
Re: Hybrid building..

ArtieToo said:
At the risk of pissin' off a few folks, soldering isn't as easy as meets the eye. It's an art form. And you're dealing with really tiny wires. I'm not saying you can't do it. But if you don't have a "nice" soldering station, you risk destroying a good pup. YMMV. ;)

Artie
Click to expand...
I found one of the secrets lies in learning how to properly tin the items to be soldered. Especially when dealing with really fine wires.

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk
 
Re: Hybrid building..

ArtieToo said:
At the risk of pissin' off a few folks, soldering isn't as easy as meets the eye. It's an art form. And you're dealing with really tiny wires. I'm not saying you can't do it. But if you don't have a "nice" soldering station, you risk destroying a good pup. YMMV. ;)

Artie
Click to expand...

True. The sketchiest part of my Antiquity/Seth 4 conductor rebuild was when the finish lead to one of the coils slipped out of the tape and exposed the coil wire. It's super thin! But it didn't break thankfully. I stuck in back in and taped it back down carefully.
 
Re: Hybrid building..

Demanic said:
I found one of the secrets lies in learning how to properly tin the items to be soldered. Especially when dealing with really fine wires.

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk
Click to expand...


Yeah, Ive not got a grasp of this yet.. Ive worked on close to 100 plus guitars, and made em work, but my soldering is hella sloppy. And Ive always gone overkill on solder. Often times I have trouble getting grounds to stick on the back of pots, (yeah, even roughing them up with either sandpaper or scratching with a pocket knife, or...) So Ill glump massive amounts of solder on it. And everything else... Glumps!! Aint pretty, but usually holds!!! I recently learned something new in a recent thread that helps alot. I always either stick the wire through the loop on the pot or hold the wires on the back of the pot and pile solder over it.. I recently read to put solder on the wire, then apply it.. Last job was much better
 
Re: Hybrid building..

I'm all about glumps everywhere. That's the only way I'm satisfied with my work... If the leads are safely buried beneath a giant blob of solder.

About getting stuff to stick on the back of a pot: You have to slam down the iron on top of a bunch of molten solder, the wires, and the pot for several moments so the pot can heat up a bit and it will stick.
 
Re: Hybrid building..

The reason for not getting the solder to stick to the back of the pots is not enough transferred heat from the iron's tip to the surface, either because of an underpowered iron or bad contact with the surface due to faulty soldering skills.

There are at least a dozen excellent "how-to" guides on soldering on Your Tube. Do your homework and it'll pay for a lifetime.

HTH,
 
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Re: Hybrid building..

Clint 55 said:
No probz!! What hybrids have you made so far?

I just finished working on my super strat. It finally works right. The neck is an Ant/Seth and the bridge is a JB/C5. I wired the Ant/Seth as 4 conductor. It has a series/split/parallel switch for each hb and bridge pickup on switch. It took me friggin 10 hours to get it to work lol! In the end the only problems were I mixed up start and finish to only 1 coil and the mag orientation. That was it. But I had no idea what was what so I had to check everything like 20 times. It was brutal!

View attachment 77872
Click to expand...
Nice work on that axe!! Im a sucker for a utility knife guitar and I used to LOVE switches and gizmos!! haha. not to get off my orig thread topic, but I have a s/s/h guit that has cool rails in the neck/middle slots and Im trying to wire in a push pull to split them and its kicking my ask... wired it several ways and cant get it to work. (was trying to use the tone pot to split em) finally bought a new push pull pot and a reg pot and am gonna gut it and try again, this time using the push pull as the volume pot position. seems most of the diagrams show it that way
 
Re: Hybrid building..

Oh no! Splitting is giving you trouble? That mod isn't too bad. Red and white to the middle lug and ground the lower lug. The push pull function is independent of the pot function so it doesn't matter if you use a volume or tone for it.

Thanks for the compliments on my guitar. The Ant/Seth in parallel sounds great so does split to the Seth coil. It was hard for me to make however. I mixed up red and green when I changed it to 4 conductor so that caused me to investigate possible reasons why split worked but series and parallel were out of phase: Reversing the mag x reversing the coils x reversing the wires x checking the grounded baseplate x checking the dcr to make sure it wasn't broken x soldering mistakes. It was difficult. The end result tho was I got it working and learned what everything does and the reasons for the results of my mistakes.
 
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Re: Hybrid building..

Tinning is the process of putting a thin coating of solder on both the surfaces that you are trying to connect. Then it makes it much easier to just touch the two surfaces together and apply a brief bit of heat to get the solder to flow together. Of course, like Lt Kojack said, you have to have an iron with proper heat at the tip too.
A big blob of solder can still hide a cold solder joint.

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk
 
Re: Hybrid building..

I like this guy's technique at 12:30 on the video. Not too much, not too little, super shiny, 0 possibility of a cold joint.

 
Re: Hybrid building..

for years Ive used a (I think) 15watt iron. I recently broke down and bought a (I think) 40 watt iron..
 
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