Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Unless something metallic has physically shorted out one of the two singlecoils of a humbucker, how is a pup going to short out. In all of my guitars and basses the closest thing that is made of metal that is not part of the pickup near my pickup is the height adjustment screws. I am sure you know a pup is a coil of wire, but unlike a coil in lets say a motor controller where it takes 115vac or 220vac or 480vac to energize it and a few amps flowing through it once energized. When you strum or pluck a string or strings on a guitar or bass, a pup creates very little voltage and amperage. If one coil of a humbucker opens then the whole pup would not output unless it is coil tapped on the single coil without the open. A shorted 15k humbucker with one single coil shorted would read half at 7.5k, but it his highly unlikely there is a short. If he would take an ohm reading and post it we could have a better idea what the problem is. Could be one of the volume pot leads has been smashed up against the body of the pot? One thing that happened to me on my Gibo BB King signature model is on one of the two output jacks, the outside nut that tightens the jack came loose and one pup did not output. Does this model have stereo output? I know a lot of Ricks do.

I think the OP has left the building.

jps wrote:I think the OP has left the building.

He joined in 2008 and never posted once. Then made 3 posts 5 years later to complain about something. What a useful contribution.

I agree that it is very odd to join something and then never, or rarely in this case, have any real (useful or otherwise) involvement.

If you look at the members list you will find over 110 pages of 0 post members!

0

I guess we'll have to add Eden to that list, huh?

08 Ric 4003 wrote:Unless something metallic has physically shorted out one of the two singlecoils of a humbucker, how is a pup going to short out. In all of my guitars and basses the closest thing that is made of metal that is not part of the pickup near my pickup is the height adjustment screws. I am sure you know a pup is a coil of wire, but unlike a coil in lets say a motor controller where it takes 115vac or 220vac or 480vac to energize it and a few amps flowing through it once energized. When you strum or pluck a string or strings on a guitar or bass, a pup creates very little voltage and amperage. If one coil of a humbucker opens then the whole pup would not output unless it is coil tapped on the single coil without the open. A shorted 15k humbucker with one single coil shorted would read half at 7.5k, but it his highly unlikely there is a short. If he would take an ohm reading and post it we could have a better idea what the problem is. Could be one of the volume pot leads has been smashed up against the body of the pot? One thing that happened to me on my Gibo BB King signature model is on one of the two output jacks, the outside nut that tightens the jack came loose and one pup did not output. Does this model have stereo output? I know a lot of Ricks do.

If one of the coil wires gets nicked, or breaks, then the coil can short out. This happened to my HB2 when I had it out of my 1989 230 while I was refinishing the guitar. Somehow the coil wire at the beginning of the pickup got nicked and the pickup was dead. I couldn't find the wire so I melted the epoxy down to the bobbin and found the tip of it, which is .002" wide with 44 gauge....pretty damn small! If I touched a meter to the tip and the other end of the pickup it read 14k, but otherwise it was dead. So I waited 5 years until I got access to a really nice microscope at Intel and I fixed the pickup very carefully and re-epoxied it and it works again, and is going to be robust and reliable again due to the re-epoxy. The early HB2's were not made as well as the later ones or the HB1's are and there is a gap between the epoxy and where the wires attach tot he circuit board on the back of the pickup.....this allows things to get in there and break the wires. I'm glad they continued the epoxy up all the way on later models of the pickups, but that isn't a guarantee against failure either as I have a later one that is unuseable due to microphonics.....

Greg

Greg

What you had was an open not a short. There are only three electrical faults. Opens, where there is a break in a wire or the circuit. Sometimes it is a good thing like when you use your light switch, you open the circuit to turn the lights off. Next are shorts, which are usually bad and trip circuit breakers and blow fuses and makes pickups have no sound. We can use them to our advantage in guitars to make a kill switch or to short out half a humbucker to make a single coil when coil tapping. Next are grounds in which a wire or an electrical component touches the metal case of a device and the device can still work but sometimes at reduced power cause we are now also sending current to ground instead of totally through our device.

08 Ric 4003 wrote:Greg

What you had was an open not a short. There are only three electrical faults. Opens, where there is a break in a wire or the circuit. Sometimes it is a good thing like when you use your light switch, you open the circuit to turn the lights off. Next are shorts, which are usually bad and trip circuit breakers and blow fuses and makes pickups have no sound. We can use them to our advantage in guitars to make a kill switch or to short out half a humbucker to make a single coil when coil tapping. Next are grounds in which a wire or an electrical component touches the metal case of a device and the device can still work but sometimes at reduced power cause we are now also sending current to ground instead of totally through our device.

Yes, true....sorry I wasn't correct in my terminology...these days I often post with little time to read and think properly...stress from school and work (or looking for work as I am now) do that to you! End result is that the pickup doesn't work until fixed in my case or in an actual short case you would have to find the short and/or rewind, which with these pickups is pretty dang hard to do.

Greg

Hi!

I recently purchased an used 650D. Before plugging it in, i recognized, the wiring of the neck pickup was not correct, so i soldered it correctly, but the pickup was still dead and i could not measure any impendance between red and blue/shield (clear and black connected together).

So i removed the pickup to measure directly, with all wires seperated on the wiring harness side:
The only impendance i was able to measure is between red and black:
All other combinations, including the shield with no value.

So it looks as one coil is working, but not the second.

Should i open the pickup, it to see if there is broken connection inside at the clear or blue connection?
Or should i use it as single coil pickup (but i would prefere the humbucker)

Regards
Alex

Kirschgeist wrote:Hi!

Regards
Alex

Mojn... Franz oder Alex?

It's my understanding the HB are potted in a way that they can not be opened.