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I need help wiring my ric humbucker. It has a ground wire and 4 different colored leads. How do I wire it so that it will work like a standard ric humbucker? I took apart my 650D, but it only had 1 lead and 1 ground wire.

vintagemusicgear wrote:I need help wiring my ric humbucker. It has a ground wire and 4 different colored leads. How do I wire it so that it will work like a standard ric humbucker? I took apart my 650D, but it only had 1 lead and 1 ground wire.

How about this?

http://www.rickenbacker.com/pdfs/19521-HB1%20Wiring.pdf

Thanks John,
I wired it up, but the pickup only reads about 6.6 K, should be more like 12-14K. Any ideas?

EDIT! After a couple of cups of coffee my noggin' is working a bit better. Ignore what I originally said (below) about parallel coils. Actually it seems like you may have swapped the blue and black which would result in only one of the coils being used (the other being shorted to itself and out of the circuit). Did you purchase the pickup new from RIC or used from somewhere else? Have you checked the resistance of each coil separately (with all of the lead wires disconnected from anything including each other)?

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Sounds like you've got the coils in parallel instead of series. Did you measure resistance across red and blue wires? The connection of the black and clear wires should not connect to anything else. It needs to be insulated somehow to avoid it shorting to another connection accidentally. A piece of heatshrink tubing is the right way, but electrical tape will do in a pinch. Now the red wire is the hot (+) and the shield connected to blue goes to ground. Good luck with it!

A P