Low DC on high output pickups

[MrFoster]

So my friend recently changed the pickups out on his Ibanez. Some weird business happened, it's the Nazgul 7 in the bridge and the Dimarzio Air Norton 7 in the neck and 1 meg pots, but the DC on both of them read lower than 9, would this be result of s botched soldering job?
Any help at all would be awesome

 

[greekdude]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

^^^ connecting just one of the coils would result in a measurement aprox. 1/2 the nominal value in series. Wired in parallel would result aprox 1/4 of the written nominal value in series. He should get the pups out the circuit and measure each of their coils in isolation. If that proves ok, then start putting everything back, step by step, and measure after each and every step.
Does this guitar have any fancy push/pull and/or toggle switches for special wirings (coil-tap, out of phase, parallel, etc)?

 

[MrFoster]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

That seems like the best course of action.
But no push pull pots here, just a 5 way switch that goes like this

1. Bridge series
2. Neck north and bridge south coils
3. Both pickups
4. Neck parallel
5. Neck series

I can get exact measurements if you'd like, but that might take a little while

 

[greekdude]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

Another idea: try gently tapping the coils with some metal object, e.g. screwdriver, running through all 5-way positions, and see what effect do they have in both pups' both coils when plugged in (turn the volume of your amp low). Do you get hum? or other noise? Do they play great? I have the air norton 6 and its pretty ballsy.

 

[astrozombie]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

That's a little weird for me. When pickups read lower than they should, in my experience, it's because they aren't hooked up right. He probably got something wrong in the conductors.

 

[Myaccount876]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

The Parallel Resistance formula is (1/R[SUB]Total[/SUB])=(1/R[SUB]1[/SUB])+(1/R[SUB]2[/SUB])+(1/R[SUB]3[/SUB])...

Assuming the pickup coils are wired in series, the two pickups on together in parallel should be about 7.41K.

If the Nazgul 7 coils both have a correct DCR of about 8.26K per coil, and the pickup is wired in series, the serial DCR should measure around the advertised 16.52K. If the Nazgul 7 is wired in parallel, the DCR should read around 4.13K.

If your Air Norton 7 has symmetrical coils (I don't know if that model has Dimarzio's patented asymmetrical coils), then each coil should read around 6.67K. If the coils are in parallel, it should read about 3.335K.

Do you have a wiring diagram and pictures of the wiring job?

 

[Rich_S]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

Does the OP's friend understand that you can't take DCR measurements once the pickups are wired to the pots, selector switch, and each other?

 

[Funkfingers]

Re: Low DC on high output pickups

I find that several of the TV Jones Filter'Tron and Dynasonic derived pickup models exhibit low DC resistance figures and ample signal output.

There is more to pickups than statistics.