No reading on EVH pickup (Not an EVH thread)

E

eviltobz

New member
Firstly, this isn't an EVH tone chasing thread. I love Eddie, but it's not about that.

I have a Peavy Wolfgang (amber flame top, gorgeous birdseye neck. yum) and having decided that the bridge pup was a bit thin, I thought I'd try swapping the pups out. After having the originals lying around loosely I decided to get my multimeter on them. The neck one gave a pretty hot reading, somewhere between 15 & 20 (my meter isn't that great) but the bridge didn't get the needle to move at all. It works. I get a suitable pickupy sound out of it, but there is no reading on the meter.

I remember talk of cloning one of Ed's old pups when making some of his signature kit and that it had no reading either. Did someone manage to work out why it was like that and replicate it? Or do I just have a pup that has magically gone bad in the same way?

In other news, my wolfy now has the duncan designed jb & jazz combo and sounds pretty sweet :)
 
Re: No reading on EVH pickup (Not an EVH thread)

Interesting thought. I may have to think about a little deconstructive surgery to investigate it later :)
 
Re: No reading on EVH pickup (Not an EVH thread)

The weirdness continues.

The pup was set up as if it were a 2 conductor, but this was just a bit of heat shrink tubing masking the others. Black and red were exposed and didn't move the needle on my meter giving an infinite resistance. Peeling the covering off gave the green and white connected together, measuring this to the red was again knackered, but to the black gave the not unexpected reading of ~7K.

Removing the tape from the pup let me check the connections right against the coils. The black and white continued the 7K reading whereas the red and green was still busted. So it seems that in some magic way, the pup was making some sound despite being incapable of creating a complete circuit. Pretty impressive really :)

That just leaves me wondering what to do with the remains. I could try rewinding the broken coil myself, which doesn't sound like a fun option as I don't have a winder. I could get it professionally rewound, I've had BareKnuckles do this for me with a different pup. Or I could try to make a hybrid with it. I do have a Samshin pup from my Epiphone Les Paul floating around :)
 
Re: No reading on EVH pickup (Not an EVH thread)

Make a hybrid out of it. Assuming the screw holes in the bobbins are compatible or another coil can be used on the Peavey baseplate, you could make a pretty wicked hybrid.

I'm very curious why Eddie's last Wolf and the current one have hotter neck pickups than the bridge. I can't complain about the sound though, somehow they balance nicely and the neck pups, both Peavey and Fender, are smooth and tasty.
 
Re: No reading on EVH pickup (Not an EVH thread)

A hybrid is a tempting option. I'd spotted a dimarzio super d on ebay being sold for spares and was thinking that might make a nice match if it had suffered a similar single coil failure. Unfortunately it ended up hitting $40! For a broken pup. With no idea what the fault was. And shipping to the UK would have bumped that well up too. So I'm still on the lookout as I doubt my Samshin would be a worthy match ;) Hmmm, all that said, I've just done a deal with Kam to buy his old 59b to make a Custom/59. I could see if I could manage to get a Wolf/59 too. That could be fun :)

As long as the neck and bridge have a decent balance it's all good. With the bust coil in my wolfy there was such a large difference between them that it was unworkable.
 
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