Is anyone here making the pre-50's P90s?

[Possum]

Did he use the right diameter magnets? The P90 style version had .20" diameter magnets, alnico 5, not readily available unless you have them made. Did he use a steel baseplate? Did he get the core and coil height just right? You can't just use an existing P90 bobbin because they are wrong.

[Steve A.]

Did he use the right diameter magnets? The P90 style version had .20" diameter magnets, alnico 5, not readily available unless you have them made. Did he use a steel baseplate? Did he get the core and coil height just right? You can't just use an existing P90 bobbin because they are wrong.

Pete fabricates everything for his pickups except for the magnets and the wire. Buy a bobbin? Never!

I mailed him the dead pickup and he made an exact replacement of it. The pole pieces were 0.197" as opposed to 0.20" but I think that was close enough. Are you sure that Gibson was using Alnico 5 back in 1948? In any case he degaussed the pole pieces to match those in the old pickup.
The 1948 Century used a metal plate to mount both the bridge and the pickup so he did not have to deal with that. With the pickup screwed to the steel bridge plate the configuration was very similar to the tele bridge/pickup assy. (The BR-9 did not use a plate like that which might account for the differences in how they sound.)

Gibson evidently used several different pickups for these models before they settled on the modern P-90 style in ~1952/3. With the string spacing much wider than a regular guitar they had to make one especially for these models. Here is the dead one from my Century 6


Steve Ahola

[Possum]

With vintage magnets I always recharge them to see how much they can hold, the one I had charged up real high, could be no other than alnico 5, nothing else will hold that high a charge. Sounds like he did a good job as long as he got the core right. There definitely were hot alnico rod magnets way back when, Fender Tele neck magnets were alnico 5 right from the start, the Blackguard book is a good book to have in your historical research library. Concurrent with these pickups P13's were also in existence and ended up in alot of lap steels, there are various widely different P13 models, I managed to scrounge each type off Ebay and seldom see some on Ebay at all anymore, especially the knucklebuster which is a truly strange but cool sounding P13. It would be better to use .20" magnets in the end because you add up 6 magnets and the loss of that much metal is a loss of a fair amount of mass, not to mention the width of the sensing window over each pole, but maybe on a lap steel the string arc isn't so big as on a regular guitar with the pickup being so close to the bridge. I liked your Ghost Riders video, made me want to learn how to play one of those things but probably not ;-)

[Peter Naglitsch]

Did he use the right diameter magnets? The P90 style version had .20" diameter magnets, alnico 5, not readily available unless you have them made.

.20" is pretty darn close to 5 mm and I can get truckloads of 5mm Alnico rods on this side of the pond...

[Possum]

5mm is .1965" or close, so its the same size really. Shea at Magnetic Hold can get you anything you need. Not a big market for these kind of lap steel pickups though.

[Possum]

Got the pickup today, cool! Its NOT the alnico version but the steel slug pole version, two bucker bars, this is the one I was hoping for as not seen one in person yet. Slugs are long and same .20" diameter. Unfortunately also dead, but he said it might be. I think these probably sounded better and warmer than the alnico rod version, now to find out if they machine wound them, probably did, and if there's a solder joint fix or whatever.