Pickup
conversion: RW/RP
In order to
make the two pickups hum-cancelling when both were used together, you
need to have one pickup with reverse windings, and a reverse magnetic
field. Its not that hard to do, if you're a little handy with a
soldering iron.
1. Take the cover off the
pickup - it just slips
off as can be seen on the last page.
2. Take out the two philips
head
screws on the bottom of the pickup. These hold the bottom plate
on.
3. Unsolder the braided jacket
on the pickup's cable,
and
pass it through the generously sized hole
in the plate. The plate now comes off, but you might have to gently
break it away as it held with some wax too.
At
this time you can...
4. Straighten the plate. I used
a machinist
vice that is capable
of great clamping strength. It flattened the plates very
nicely. A regular vice WITH SMOOTH JAWS
would do though. I liked the machinest
vice since it had large smooth jaws. I'd hesitate to bend it by
hand, as you'll likely end up with something bent even worse.
If you're not doing the RW/RP
procedure, just put it all back together
now that the base plate is straight, or...
5. Carefully unwind the white lead
from the braid - a bit of a chore
because you have to desolder it as you go. Tip: You only need
about 1/4 inch of exposed lead beyond the white jacket, so save
yourself some grief and just stop when you get that much free from the
braid.
6. Take off the tape that covers the
connection of the center black
wire on the pickup wire. Unsolder that
connection.
7. What I did now was to trim
off about 3/4 inch of the pickup
wire to eliminate that spot where the rest of the lead wire was coiled
on it (see 5, above), and to have a clean fresh end to work with.
8. After prepping the fresh end of the
wire (see 7), solder the white
lead wire to the center black wire of the
pickup wire and retape it. I used white cloth tape to contrast
the black tape used by Gibson. That way I'd know which pickup was
the
reversed one.
Now some magnet fun...
9. Put a dot of marker ink on the
outside edge of each magnet.
This is to assure you that when you put them back in they're reversed!
10. Pry the magnets off. They're
only held by wax. They just
sit there, and the wax holds them in place.
11. Reverse the polarity, and
put em back on the pickup.
Gently heat the wax by unplugging your hot soldering iron and pressing
it to the magnet. DO NOT LEAVE
THE SOLDERING IRON PLUGGED IN. If you do, the coil in the
soldering iron's heater MAY demagnetize
the magnet a bit.
Check to make sure you can not see the ink dots you made in 9,
above. Both of what was formerly the outside edges of the magnets
ought to be the inside edges now.
12. Pass the braid through the
baseplate, and pass the black wire
through the baseplate. Now solder them both in place. You
don't need to "wrap" the black wire around braid like Gibson did.
Leaving it unwrapped will make disassembly easier if you need to take
it apart at some later date.
13. Put the baseplate back on, screw
in the screws. Heat it with
a hot unplugged soldering iron to seat it, then snug up the screws.
14. Test each pickup to make sure the
coils are ok. They ought to
read about 8.5k ohms.
15. Put them aside, covers off,
someplace where filings and stuff won't
stick to them.
Hopefully this image will make things
clearer. Not shown is the
insulation tape that covers where the black center pickup wire joins
the lead wire (in either case)
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