Weasel's repair and rewind thread

[tedtan]

Looking forward to it.

Also, as I’m in the US, I’ve seen most of the pickups here, but I have little experience with some of the pickups on guitars built across the pond, so it’s good to see various Hagstrom, Burns, Framus, etc. pickups. They had some different approaches, like the Burns air coils and so forth.

Old Gretsch Filtertrons would be cool, too, if you have anything on them, or maybe a Charlie Christian type pickup.

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

Looking forward to it.

Also, as I’m in the US, I’ve seen most of the pickups here, but I have little experience with some of the pickups on guitars built across the pond, so it’s good to see various Hagstrom, Burns, Framus, etc. pickups. They had some different approaches, like the Burns air coils and so forth.

Old Gretsch Filtertrons would be cool, too, if you have anything on them, or maybe a Charlie Christian type pickup.

The Shergold rebuild should float yer boat then ... basically throw away the book on how to build humbuckers ... and make something totally original ... sounds nothing like a PAF lol

 

[crushingpetal]

So coming up soon, we have gold foils, Gibson P13 (the pickup that gave birth to the P90) dead Shergold pickups from the good old 70s in the UK ... plus I invisibly mend a Seymour Duncan that someone put a drill bit through ... and make a ten string humbucker to replace someone's ten string single coil ...
All coming up soon

I'm subscribed. Looking forward to the P13s.

 

[A.JohnHayes]

I’d love to hear about some of your designs some time! The Blackbird is well regarded here, and I’m very curious about the neo x-breeds!

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

I’d love to hear about some of your designs some time! The Blackbird is well regarded here, and I’m very curious about the neo x-breeds!

I'm always mindful that I'm a business and a manufacturer - so I don't want to go all spammy - I'm also a guitarist (and have been since the 70s) who came up on the surge of NWOBHM so I tend to write about stuff that interests me.
I'm probably going to pop a set of clear bobbin Neo-X-Breeds in my cheap as chips, brand new but paint chipped Ibanez Geo 7 I got for £150! I've just put on locking tuners and an Earvana nut, but the pickups are as interesting as watching milk curdle - so that might make some interesting content for some folks (the Neo-X-Breed is half neodymium half ceramic).
Below: a Stone Wolf & with my Neo-X-Breeds.

I like pretty things

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

As promised here is the photo story of bringing a dead Shergold pickup back to life ... and take it too as a homage from me to those classic old UK builders from back in the day. They didn't have the availability of parts and materials that us modern pickup builders take for granted ... so they made do, and designed their way around the problems. Sometimes those design choices were odd and over complex (to say the least) ... but you had to admire their grit.

The first thing you notice about a vintage Shergold pickup is how huge it is by comparison with a modern humbucker. With the lid off it is easy to see why that is. The engineering is both exquisite, and to almost 'War Department' standards of ruggedness!

The actually very modest coils are sat on top of an absolutely huge 'cage' made out of aluminium and steel that contains a massive but very weak and unstable magnet.


The huge 'buttresses' that flank the magnet are what serves for a keeper bar ... 1/4 inch mild steel bar, tapped for the pole screws and stamped into the aluminum top and bottom plates to form a rigid structure. They build bridges weaker than this these-days!

Easy to see why the coil lowest in the picture has died ... just look at the amount of corrosion that has been caused by gig sweat going down into the pickup's guts!
Yuck ....

This really shows how much rust plays a part in the death of pickups, especially as rust molecules take up more than 8 times the space of the iron they replaced which can expand into the coils and break through the insulation layer causing shorts or breaks.
Right .... now for the serious stripping ...

Gungy corrosion ahoy on the windings and boy this smells bad!

measured the wire diameter by the tried and trusted method of taking ten turns around a screwdriver, then measuring the width of the 10 turns with a digital vernier ... and dividing by 10! This wire was so corroded and nasty that I ended up taking 20 turns around to get an accurate average!

When I know the wire diameter I weigh the bobbin with wire, strip the wire off and weigh the bare bobbin ... winding by weight is super accurate.

with .056mm 43awg wire chosen, the old wire was stripped off to reveal a curious and very, very delicate 'cut and shut' bobbin.
Which seems to have been made by sawing down a much taller bobbin and gluing it with something resembling plastic model aircraft glue.
I had to reinforce it with fillets of superglue and make a cradle so that it wouldn't fall apart in the winding machine! Age hadn't been kind to it!

And winding ho!
I'll continue this tomorrow ....

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

Okay ...
Wound with 'new old stock' wire ... And taped ...


Meanwhile I drifted out the pretty much dead old magnet,

they are horribly unstable and don't recharge well,

so I substituted a 1/4 inch thick alnico magnet, but there was still a lot of real-estate to fill out, so I made a custom mahogany spacer to position the magnet correctly. I used a bit of hot melt glue to fix everything and stop squeal.

Now to re unite the bobbins with the pickup.

The issue now was that all the corrosion in the pole keeper bars had left the pole screws loose, sure to vibrate and squeal under gain, so I used the old dodge of blowing a tiny amount of superglue onto the female threads and letting it dry ... this packs them enough to tighten the pole screws a bit on the thread.

Pole screws in ... and mounted back on the plastic base. now to clean up the output tag strip a bit ... I hate untidy old solder blobs hanging about.

Everything about these pickups are big, and cross between agricultural and fifties amateur radio!
All back together ...


And ready to rock for years to come ... the owner said this one sounded exactly as it should ... which means I did my job well. The magnet substitution should make the pickup much more stable going forward.
I love quirky old British pickups ... there was so much post war 'mend and make do' involved, yet they sounded ace.

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

Coming up shortly ... I mean this is a seven string forum ... the making of my 7 string Neo-X-Breeds
Clear bobbins waiting to be wound with lots of lovely wire

 

[Concerto412]

Very cool write up on the Sheffield. The military analogy seems bang-on; ‘overbuilt’ is an understatement! The double-row fillisters and black cover look pretty imposing, do you have a photo of it in relation to a modern ‘bucker for scale?

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

Very cool write up on the Sheffield. The military analogy seems bang-on; ‘overbuilt’ is an understatement! The double-row fillisters and black cover look pretty imposing, do you have a photo of it in relation to a modern ‘bucker for scale?

It's I don't have side by side images, but the Shergold is more Fender Wide Range humbucker size ... but deeper

 

[tedtan]

That was pretty cool. I had never even heard of the Shergold - how do they sound? Fender WRHB-ish?

 

[Das Gitarrenwiesel]

That was pretty cool. I had never even heard of the Shergold - how do they sound? Fender WRHB-ish?

Actually the sound is very original: Clean, very wide frequency response, very much typical of some of the guitar sounds of British prog rock in the 1970s. I had a Shergold electric 12 String back in the 70s ... with these pickups ... and it cried out for Barclay James Harvest or the Moody Blues ... not really distorted lead players guitars.