Mr 9finger
Digitally Challenged
It's July 4th, there is NOTHING open and your buddy calls you franticly basically screaming, "I HAVE A GIG IN 2 HOURS AND THE MIDDLE PICKUP ON MY GUITAR JUST DIED!" First off, you're thinking "jackass I told you if you were going to be gigging to buy a backup guitar". 2nd off you're thinking "I have no single coil pickups laying around?!"
What do you do? You use a little American ingenuity. Lucky for said friend, I have alot of misc. little things laying around and I've learned alot from this cozy little forum. So off on a little pickup "making" adventure we go!
After looking over his guitar, a 95 MIA strat, the pickup was indeed dead. It wasn't the stock pickup but I have no clue as to what it is. So I get to thinking I have some extra parts laying around and maybe just maybe we can assemble a pickup on the fly and bail his butt out once again.
The Parts. 1 Coil from a Dimarzio Super 3, a baseplate and magnet from a wacked duncan hotrail and some wire.
Well right off the bat we ran into trouble, being it was coil from a bucker and didn't have typical single coil wiring style exits, we had to do a little customizing consisting of CAREFULLY notching the bobbin and the baseplate so we could get it to fit
After this we did a quick test fit and then glued them together via super glue! The result
Now for the wiring. Thankfully Dimarzio makes it easy to tell which is the start and finish wires so this was a peice of case. One problem I had though was not enough wire to thread it through all the holes properly so they just got sheilded and glued to the base plate.
Not exactly the neatest job done, but hey, we were pinched for time so I didn't have many options.
Next was the magnet. I didn't want to glue it to the bottom of the poles since they were adjustable and it is a 13K bobbin. So I went w/ a side mount and a bit of an air gap to soften it up a bit.
All in all it turned out sounding not to bad. I had a pic of it in the guitar but for some reason it's not on my memory card "he probably shut the camera off to soon". It's not the best sounding single I've ever heard but for needing a single coil pickup NOW, it turned out good. Luckily enough it was in phase on the first shot so I didn't have to jack around w/ that any. He made it out of here w/ about 30 minutes to get there and sound check. So I thank you Seymour Duncan User Group for all of you sharing your knowledge w/ me over the past and thus allowing to save my buddies butt once again!
What do you do? You use a little American ingenuity. Lucky for said friend, I have alot of misc. little things laying around and I've learned alot from this cozy little forum. So off on a little pickup "making" adventure we go!
After looking over his guitar, a 95 MIA strat, the pickup was indeed dead. It wasn't the stock pickup but I have no clue as to what it is. So I get to thinking I have some extra parts laying around and maybe just maybe we can assemble a pickup on the fly and bail his butt out once again.
The Parts. 1 Coil from a Dimarzio Super 3, a baseplate and magnet from a wacked duncan hotrail and some wire.
Well right off the bat we ran into trouble, being it was coil from a bucker and didn't have typical single coil wiring style exits, we had to do a little customizing consisting of CAREFULLY notching the bobbin and the baseplate so we could get it to fit
After this we did a quick test fit and then glued them together via super glue! The result
Now for the wiring. Thankfully Dimarzio makes it easy to tell which is the start and finish wires so this was a peice of case. One problem I had though was not enough wire to thread it through all the holes properly so they just got sheilded and glued to the base plate.
Not exactly the neatest job done, but hey, we were pinched for time so I didn't have many options.
Next was the magnet. I didn't want to glue it to the bottom of the poles since they were adjustable and it is a 13K bobbin. So I went w/ a side mount and a bit of an air gap to soften it up a bit.
All in all it turned out sounding not to bad. I had a pic of it in the guitar but for some reason it's not on my memory card "he probably shut the camera off to soon". It's not the best sounding single I've ever heard but for needing a single coil pickup NOW, it turned out good. Luckily enough it was in phase on the first shot so I didn't have to jack around w/ that any. He made it out of here w/ about 30 minutes to get there and sound check. So I thank you Seymour Duncan User Group for all of you sharing your knowledge w/ me over the past and thus allowing to save my buddies butt once again!
.... nice touch indeed
