RevJToad
New member
Hey mangs. In my ongoing experimentation/scrounging, I came across a couple of old pickups I'd forgotten about, which seem a bit odd.
The story of their origin is hazy - I got them from a friend of mine (technically, they're still his, so he'll probably get them back shortly), who installed them in my Hagstrom II a number of years back. He says they came out of a Les Paul, but assuming that's true, I figure at least one of them had already replaced the stock pickup in said LP.
Both are black, both have had the brackets on the sides broken off, and both have bits of solder at the, umm, "top" and "bottom" edges which I assume once held a cover on.
One them has some extra markings which may or may not make it identifiable, which is that each coil has a T shape on the top of the spool (bobbin?), though I'm fairly certain it's an upside down T (ie. just a right angle), cause there's also, between two of the polepieces slightly above and below, a number and what appears to be an H with an extra line in the middle. The numbers are a 2 on one coil and a 3 on the other. If any of this is ringing even a very distant bell in anyone's head and they want to see it, I can take a pic. The other one is just plain black, no distinctive markings whatsoever.
Anyways, the weirdness is in the readings, and the wires on one of them. The one with no markings has two wires and reads 7.63 ohms The other one, with the markings, is a complete oddball: two wrapped wires and a bare (ground, I assume) wire in a black wrapper. The only two wires that give a reading are Red/Bare, which is 3.67. White/Bare and White/Red don't do anything.
This sounds to me like an open and shut case of one coil being dead, but that still seems odd. First off, this wiring scheme would suggest that the pickup is meant to be wired in parallel, which I understand is not done very often with humbuckers. The other is that when I had these in my Hag, they both bucked the hum quite nicely, although the neck, which I can only assume was the one with the 7.63 reading, was a LOT louder than the bridge.
Given the current reading, this makes sense in retrospect, but at the time, I only knew that bridge pickups were generally wrapped hotter than neck/mid to compensate for less string movement that close to the bridge, so I figured my buggy had messed up and reversed the intended positions of the two pickups. Still, even with that taken into account, the difference in volume between the two was pronounced enough to be called radical, and I soon swapped them out for a pair of Duncan '59s.
Anyways, any thoughts on these, especially that weak one? I also recall that the neck pickup when these were in sounded pretty nice.
The story of their origin is hazy - I got them from a friend of mine (technically, they're still his, so he'll probably get them back shortly), who installed them in my Hagstrom II a number of years back. He says they came out of a Les Paul, but assuming that's true, I figure at least one of them had already replaced the stock pickup in said LP.
Both are black, both have had the brackets on the sides broken off, and both have bits of solder at the, umm, "top" and "bottom" edges which I assume once held a cover on.
One them has some extra markings which may or may not make it identifiable, which is that each coil has a T shape on the top of the spool (bobbin?), though I'm fairly certain it's an upside down T (ie. just a right angle), cause there's also, between two of the polepieces slightly above and below, a number and what appears to be an H with an extra line in the middle. The numbers are a 2 on one coil and a 3 on the other. If any of this is ringing even a very distant bell in anyone's head and they want to see it, I can take a pic. The other one is just plain black, no distinctive markings whatsoever.
Anyways, the weirdness is in the readings, and the wires on one of them. The one with no markings has two wires and reads 7.63 ohms The other one, with the markings, is a complete oddball: two wrapped wires and a bare (ground, I assume) wire in a black wrapper. The only two wires that give a reading are Red/Bare, which is 3.67. White/Bare and White/Red don't do anything.
This sounds to me like an open and shut case of one coil being dead, but that still seems odd. First off, this wiring scheme would suggest that the pickup is meant to be wired in parallel, which I understand is not done very often with humbuckers. The other is that when I had these in my Hag, they both bucked the hum quite nicely, although the neck, which I can only assume was the one with the 7.63 reading, was a LOT louder than the bridge.
Given the current reading, this makes sense in retrospect, but at the time, I only knew that bridge pickups were generally wrapped hotter than neck/mid to compensate for less string movement that close to the bridge, so I figured my buggy had messed up and reversed the intended positions of the two pickups. Still, even with that taken into account, the difference in volume between the two was pronounced enough to be called radical, and I soon swapped them out for a pair of Duncan '59s.
Anyways, any thoughts on these, especially that weak one? I also recall that the neck pickup when these were in sounded pretty nice.
