Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I took one of these original horseshoe pickups offa these lapsteels and hawaiian guitars I see on ebay all the time and tried to mod it into a 400 or 4001 bass.

Can this be done?Should I put the crack pipe down?

put the crack pipe down

I say try it ...

I don't know Marc, once you get your hands on one of those Rickenbacker lap steels, you start to have second thoughts. I bought one as a gift for a friend and I really enjoyed the 4 months between purchase and Birthday. Then again, if you shoved a high gain into the lap steel after lifting its horseshoe that might be fun on both fronts. One warning -- and you can find an extensive thread on this under the lap steels sections, those are old instruments and the magnets on the horshoes are likely to be fading. And getting the magnets "recharged" is not so easy and carries some risk of using the pickup. Doesn't mean that you wont love the sound of the pickup but it may not have the volume that you expect. The one I bought (ebay) sounded great.

saw different versions (could be wrong) but one version had a 1 piece horseshoe that surrounded the p'up. The second was like the reissue version with 2 pieces.

Then again once you get it you may not want to tinker with a vintage RIC.

Do it, then let us know!

Yeah ,that's it, I'll be the guinea pig!

The problem will be finding one cheap enough, but also ask questions about the pickup before buying it.

In the end,you're tight, I'll probably love the lapsteel and want to keep it like that.

Here's some:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3704824543&category=41439

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3704554251&category=41439

I wondered about this myself. Has anybody measured one of these lap steel pickups? The 4000 series horseshoe is 1.25" wide but I thought some of these lap steel shoes could be 1.5" wide. I know Lollar guitars offers a Rickenbacker style horseshoe pickup for about 300 bucks but it is 1.5" making it a poor candidate.

That's my fear too.

The whole thing that's bugging me is that my luthier is telling me that while the reissue horseshoe may sound great, it just doesn't work magnetically like the original.

It's quite easy to do. I rebuilt a bass pickup from parts I got from a '55 8 stringer pickup. I used the 7.4k of wire from the 8 st coil as well as the magnets & used a re-fashioned bobbin made to the same measurements as the '64 bobbin I had that crumbled. Or you could use almost any Rick bass pickup less magnets.

the original horseshoe is different ... the reissue has alnico slugs ... however with the reissue the surround is magnitized ...

Please do not go robbing lap steels of their pickups! They are hard enough to come by as is.
I think I am going to cry.