Help With A Broken Pickup

[The Evily Dark One]

ok, i need help with a pickup, on my Bc Rich Warlock, i found recently that the mounting screw had come out of the hole in the pickup, and upon fixing it, the pickup stopped working entirely, and im not actually sure why, but the tape around the edge of the humbucker appears to have torn.

the pickup itself was taken from a PRS guitar (bought from my old tutor) and on the back there is a label with the words Vintage Bass.

i Know its Hard to know exactly whats wrong without seeing it, but any help would be appreciated.

[biliousfrog]

If the tape is torn there's a chance that the windings were damaged at the same time. I assume that you've checked for loose or damaged wires inside the guitar.

[The Evily Dark One]

If the tape is torn there's a chance that the windings were damaged at the same time. I assume that you've checked for loose or damaged wires inside the guitar.

i have, and all the wiring is fine, but i think ive found the problem, the windings are damaged.

and im assuming that, the winding consists of a continuous wire, which once broken, disrupts the flow of electricity....

so what options do i have?

thanks by the way!

[ToneMonkey]

If the tape around the side of the pup is damaged, then it may have taken some of the coil with it. The wire is really thin and it doesn't take much to break it.

Hopefully I'm wrong.

[The Evily Dark One]

nope, your correct, there is a small amount of wire sticking out.

the thing is, how would i fix it, or would it be better to replace the pickup with a new one?

[Robert_the_damned]

you can either re-wind the pickup (can be done yourself but its hard to do well if you've not had practice or get it done by someone else which is expensive) or buy a new pickup. A new pickup might be cheeper than having the pickup re-wound depending on what sort of pickup you want (a guitar fetish pickup is cheep a new PRS will be a lot more).

[unklmickey]

Robert gave you some good advice.

GFS pickups are cheap and great value for the $.

you could do some surgery on the damaged coil. if you identify the connection that is going to the FINISH of the winding, you could disconnect the coil wire and unwind until you get to the damaged portion. since there is about a mile of wire on the coil, discarding several feet won't make THAT much difference. then you would remove the enamel coating from the end of the wire, and solder that, to the wire that goes to the outside world.

if you want to keep things in better balance, for hum-cancelling, you would then remove the same number of turns from the other coil.

your pickup will be slighly underwound, compared to before, so it will be a little less "dark" and have a little less output.

if at any time in the process you break the enamel wire going to the START of either winding, ... game over.

unless you are skilled at microsurgery, i'd recommend skipping the whole endeavor.

cheers,

unk

[The Evily Dark One]

kk, thanks for the advice, im in the process of finding the original pickup for the guitar cos microsurgery is not my forte, thanks for the help though, it did help!