Higain horror

Building pickups from the ground up

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blackrock
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Higain horror

Post by blackrock »

Hi
Ooops! Was trying to to get the stock neck pickup on my '78 4001 to sound a bit louder by making some shallow recesses for the screws into the pickguard back to try and get it a bit closer to the strings... Anyway, it must have been one test reassembly too many with the pickup wire being moved around a bit too much for it's liking and now I've gone and broken it - the wire has snapped at the point where the heatshrink on the white wire joins the black wire coming from the pickup.

I'm seriously hoping I can fix this myself. If so, what do I need to do to get enough wire from the coil side to resolder it the white wire and make a new heatshrink join? What's the story with the black 'wire'? Is it just an insulation sheath and I have to disassemble the pickup and put an outer wraps worth of coil wire through the sheath? Or can the black insulation just be stripped back a bit instead to reveal wire to solder to?

Any advice how to go about this would be greatly welcome. Cheers.
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Grey
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Re: Higain horror

Post by Grey »

Well I can't help you with your broken wire, but you don't need to modify the pickguard to move the pickup closer to the strings.

Those 4 screws just hold the cover and plate together, you can remove those and mount the pickup with the two height adjustment screws, they'll hold the bobbin together and the pickup can be put flat against the underside. Works fine.
blackrock
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Re: Higain horror

Post by blackrock »

Thanks for going to the trouble of suggesting that. Actually that had occurred to me, but I'd abandoned that route when I saw that the the other wire from the coil is soldered to a metal terminal grounding thing (sorry, I don't know the proper term for it) - anyhow that is held onto the pickup baseplate by one of the screws. I didn't know how to deal with that with the screw no longer there to keep it against the baseplate - and ironically, was worried about breaking the wires from the pickup by messing around too much with it. How did you solve that incidentally?

Well anyway, maybe I could return to that if/when I can get the broken wire sorted.
blackrock
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Re: Higain horror

Post by blackrock »

Actually now looking at the other black wire I referred to in response to Eriks suggestion, I can see that the wire there looks too thick to be coil wire, so I'm now assuming both the black wires are transitional connection wires and not sheathed coil wire.

If that's so, just stripping back the wire might for soldering be more of a possibility I'm now imagining. If so, here would be my next stupid/basic question. There's only 1.5cm of black wire to play with and get that right, without messing up and nicking or accidentally partially cutting it during the stripping.
I've read some people using the soldering iron to melt the insulation as the safest way, while others say blade or wirestrippers is the only way.

Sorry if this is very basic stuff, but if that is indeed my next move, which is the safest, most reliable way to get enough wire to solder onto?
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Grey
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Re: Higain horror

Post by Grey »

blackrock wrote:I didn't know how to deal with that with the screw no longer there to keep it against the baseplate - and ironically, was worried about breaking the wires from the pickup by messing around too much with it. How did you solve that incidentally?
Just move it to the long mounting screw and put one of the nuts on the bottom.
blackrock
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Re: Higain horror

Post by blackrock »

You know at one point i'd even tried one of the other nuts on the long screw to see if it fitted, with that very thought in mind, but then looked at the length of that wire and thought 'Nah, that'll be a bit of a stretch for it to reach, don't want to risk straining it' - so didn't even try it.
Since you'd mentioned it now though, I just tried it and you are right, it does just make it.
So thank you, appreciate that.

I'll certainly go for that method then, once I've found out how to fix this pesky broken wire and can get the pickup working
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