Can Anyone Identify this Single Coil Rail (bar) type PU?

[52 Bill]

Sweetfinger: Yes the pickup that I was referring to was the one shown in your photo. The one with the solid metal cover and 6 screw polepieces. Thanks for the info.

And thanks to all for sharing the photos of the Gibson made Harmony parts. I really thought that it was a well established fact that Gibson made a lot of parts for other companies back in the day.

[jason lollar]

[David Schwab]

Reminds me of the time I listed a couple of covered, gold plated, Gibson DirtyFingers pickups on eBay. These were removed, by myself, from an '81 ES-347. The guitar had all the tags and the booklet, which stated they were DirtyFingers. This guitar belonged to Clay Smith from Kool and the Gang, and had never been played. He gave it to a guy I knew who used to be in their touring band, and he wanted the pickups changed because these were too hot.

The pickups had the coil-cut wire and were 16K. So some clown, who was professing to be a vintage guitar expert, wrote me to say they weren't DirtyFingers, and were actually SuperHumbuckers, even though that was one of the first models of guitars to come with DirtyFingers, the paperwork with the guitar called them DirtyFingers, and they were 16K, which the SuperHumbuckers were not.

I showed him a press release from Gibson saying the 347 had them, and even a photo of a 347 with them. But none of that mattered to this guy. So facts be damned! People will hold on to their ideas even if they are mistaken.

[Sweetfinger]

Don't "Dirtyfingers" have two screw coils?

[David King]

Careful Sweetfinger, I'm a fantasy troll...

[David Schwab]

Don't "Dirtyfingers" have two screw coils?

The uncovered versions do, but not the ones that were in the 347, since they have covers.

Here is the actual set I was selling. It was from an '84 ES-347, not an '81 as I had said in my previous post (I wasn't home at the time to find this image). Note that the ES-347 only came with DirtyFingers, and always came with gold plated covers.



From the press release for the reissues:

The original Dirty Fingers pickups were available on just a few select models in the early 1980s, including the Flying V, Explorer, ES-347 and 335-S. They were all but forgotten for two decades, until an international distributor ordered a special run of reissue Dirty Fingers pickups for their market in 1997.

So Gibson didn't always do what you expected from them, and liked to use the same name on slightly different versions of pickups, such as all the various SuperHumbers they had made. The L6-S had them with no poles showing, and others had them looking like these DirtyFingers.

But only the DirtyFingers were 16K. They were nice sounding pickups. I had them in my Charvel CX-290 for a while. But they were on the noisy side, so I sold them.

ES347

[big_teee]

The uncovered versions do, but not the ones that were in the 347, since they have covers.

Here is the actual set I was selling. It was from an '84 ES-347, not an '81 as I had said in my previous post (I wasn't home at the time to find this image). Note that the ES-347 only came with DirtyFingers, and always came with gold plated covers.



From the press release for the reissues:



So Gibson didn't always do what you expected from them, and liked to use the same name on slightly different versions of pickups, such as all the various SuperHumbers they had made. The L6-S had them with no poles showing, and others had them looking like these DirtyFingers.

But only the DirtyFingers were 16K. They were nice sounding pickups. I had them in my Charvel CX-290 for a while. But they were on the noisy side, so I sold them.

ES347

Was that a stock solder job on the covers.
Never seen any, where the cover was soldered all the way around?
But then I've lived a Sheltered Life!
T

[David Schwab]

Was that a stock solder job on the covers.
Never seen any, where the cover was soldered all the way around?
But then I've lived a Sheltered Life!
T

There's no solder. The pickups are epoxy encapsulated. The pickup has no baseplate, just the piece that goes across the back that forms the mounting "legs." You can see it running under the sticker. The SuperHumbuckers were made in a similar way. The SH was a Bill Lawrence design. I don't know who designed these.

Here's an L6-S pickup with no epoxy. They probably used the same parts.

[Ward]

Was that a stock solder job on the covers.
Never seen any, where the cover was soldered all the way around?
But then I've lived a Sheltered Life!
T

AND you don't see real well either Terry?

[big_teee]

AND you don't see real well either Terry?

Your right About being Blind in one eye and can't see from the other! lol
I can tell after I looked again, but I wasn't expecting that from a Gibson.
It looked like a baseplate with solder all over it the first time I looked.
I told you I've lived a sheltered life, I haven't seen any DirtyFinger Pickups running around here.
Terry

[David Schwab]

I told you I've lived a sheltered life, I haven't seen any DirtyFinger Pickups running around here.
Terry

Most of them look kind of like this:



Kind of hard to miss what kind of pickup it is! The old ones don't have the logotype.

[Sweetfinger]

... some clown, who was professing to be a vintage guitar expert, wrote me to say they weren't DirtyFingers, and were actually SuperHumbuckers, even though that was one of the first models of guitars to come with DirtyFingers, the paperwork with the guitar called them DirtyFingers, and they were 16K, which the SuperHumbuckers were not.

I showed him a press release from Gibson saying the 347 had them, and even a photo of a 347 with them. But none of that mattered to this guy. So facts be damned! People will hold on to their ideas even if they are mistaken.

Clown? IIRC it was YOU who insisted that ALL DF pickups had COVERS and never came stock with bare coils! I thought we had just agreed to disagree and moved on. In an amusing twist, I asked Gibson to clarify what pickups came on the ES-347, and their own specs say they came with "Super Humbuckers". In your defense, There IS Gibson literature from the period that describes the pickups in question as "covered Dirty Fingers". Then again, Gibson's ad copy has on more than one occasion, failed to rise to accepted journalistic standards! Who's right? Gibson just told me they were Super Humbuckers and they certainly look like Supers and are constructed like Super Hums. There's plenty of "clown" to go around on the DF thing.

I have been inspired. I think I will contact Gibson again and see if they would be willing to let me research and write a definitive guide to their less popular and less understood pickup models... perhaps, starting with the P-13. I'll keep ya posted.

[David Schwab]

Clown? IIRC it was YOU who insisted that ALL DF pickups had COVERS and never came stock with bare coils!

Was that you who wrote me back then? Sure sounds like it now.

Also I never said such a thing. I said all the DirtyFingers that came on the 347 had covers. That's a fact. Prove that it's not. You said no DirtyFingers had covers.

They are DirtyFingers because they were 16K. SuperHumbers were never 16K.

Plus the brochure that came with the guitar, that was still in the case, called them DirtyFingers. There was a sticker on the pickguard that called them DirtyFingers. Why did they print up that stuff to include with the guitar if it wasn't true?

Their press release also called them DirtyFingers, as I have quoted above.

No one from the current Gibson has a clue what went on back then.