"Vintage" Strat Pickups for Compound Radius Necks?

[rjb]

But can someone recommend an off-the-shelf pickup model of the style Bob calls "type c" (the style shown in the video in post 11)?

My Squire mini-Strat (converted to a 5-string octave mandolin) has "Bob Type A" pickups with steel poles and a pair of ceramic magnets. I've misplaced my calipers, but the poles eyeball close to 3/16" diameter and probably could be replaced with alnico poles. That could be somewhat of a PITA- but on the other hand, I bought the whole (B-stock) guitar for, like, forty bucks.

-rb

PS- Bob, did you ever get that G&L Strat sorted out? What type pickups does it have?

[bob p]

Thanks for those measurement specs! That's pure gold!

In retrospect maybe I should have photographed and measured those 2017 Texas Specials that had the exaggerated stagger and sounded so imbalanced. I like to think that their stagger was worse than any of those specs, but I never took them apart to measure them. Since I wasn't going to keep the defective body I just sent it back.

I'm still hoping to find a decent off-the-shelf option if one is available. What I'm really hoping for is to find a reasonably priced flat-stagger "modern" pickup set that's voiced to vintage tone if I can find something like that. If that's a unicorn, then I guess I have no option other than to start push-modding an off-the-shelf set of pups with plastic bobbins so that the only force I'm working against is some wax.

Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding pickups that fit the bill -- so far the only "bob type c" pickup that I've noticed that seems to be available currently as a boxed set is the Tex-Mex. I don't know if other options might be available on current production guitars, or if they may have been discontinued. Fender web specs on guitars aren't all that revealing, and the non-attractive nature of the current line of Fender guitars is what got me into the partscaster project in the first place.

The Tex Mex has a plastic bobbin, is staggered, has alnico 5 magnets and measures 6.5kR to 7.4kR (kind of hot). Is it even possible to take off some of the windings to render it more vintage sounding, or does the potting wax just mean that you have to cut all of the wire out and start over? If that's the case then home winding on a set of blanks is starting to look better.

I'm resisting the temptation to ramble on about the Legacy. It really deserves it's own thread. Although it looks like a Strat none of the parts (neck, pickguard, tremolo) interchange with a Strat. I suppose I could pull the flat Alnico pups out of the pickguard and build a new Strat pickguard assembly around them, but even with circuit tweaks they're pretty shrill sounding without much bass response and ultimately not what I want for the partscaster.

[rjb]

Is it even possible to take off some of the windings to render it more vintage sounding, or does the potting wax just mean that you have to cut all of the wire out and start over?

I once "almost" successfully vintage-fied a hot Epiphone Dot humbucker. I betcha unwinding a plastic-bobbin single coil would be considerably easier.

Most of the wax filling the covers was removed just by heating with a hair dryer and tapping the assembly on the workbench. With the Epi HBs, the real PITA was that the coils were potted with something like construction adhesive (think Liquid Nails). I had to repeatedly stop unwinding to heat the coil with a hairdryer and wipe and scrape adhesive with a shop towel and a 1/4" strip of old credit card.

IIRC, my unwinding procedure went something like this:
[Skip irrelevant details regarding disassembly & avoidance of coil wire breakage at "Start" lead wire junction.]
Remove screws from bobbin to provide a flat front surface (slugs are already flush with their bobbin top.)
Using double-sided tape, stick bobbin face-down to workbench top.
With dominant hand, use "coffee stirrer" motion to unwind coil; with non-dominant hand, simultaneously use "mon back" motion to take up coil wire around fingers.

I successfully unwound both coils using this method. Reassembled the pickup and everything ohmed out. Unfortunately, a loop of coil wire had pushed its way up along the inner face of a bobbin flange, and I couldn't resist the temptation to scrape off that damn glob of adhesive....

Anyways, relatively speaking, unwinding a single coil should be a piece of cake.

-rb

PS - I used the "Cherokee" method to keep track of turns count: http://music-electronics-forum.com/t42276/

[bob p]

so I'd be looking at playing Cherokee about 30 times to get ~7500 winds for a single strat pickup? and do that 3 times to make 3 pickups?

I like the song, but I don't think I could stand still for 90 replays without breaking into a Fox Trot. That starts to make sacrificing a calculator to make a sewing machine counter sound appealing.

Still hoping for an off the shelf solution...

PS - I recently had an Epi 335 Pro that I had to give back because the Slim-D neck was so painfully thin. I was amazed by how good it's pickups sounded.

[rjb]

so I'd be looking at playing Cherokee about 30 times to get ~7500 winds for a single strat pickup? and do that 3 times to make 3 pickups?

No. You would use the Salvarsan coil estimator to guesstimate how many turns to remove from your too-hot pickups to get into the vintage zone. Coil Estimator

A possible problem with the calculator/sewing machine combo is that the calculator will drop counts if you run the winder too fast; it will think that your impossibly fast "button pushes" are switch bounce.

-rb

[Chuck H]

I recently had an Epi 335 Pro that I had to give back because the Slim-D neck was so painfully thin. I was amazed by how good it's pickups sounded.

It probably had nothing to do with the thin, set neck and semi hollow body construction