I bought one of these on eBay a while back. Price is totally right, less than $30. As usual I couldn't resist and took it apart to see what was inside.
It's not a single coil. It is a Johnny Smith style floating mini humbucker pickup, with two opposed coils, a ceramic magnet in the center of the covered coil, a metal base plate under both coils, and 4-40 thread pole screws in the coil that can be adjusted from the top.
In getting it apart I melted out a massive gob of wax. Wax potting is really about filling in the spaces in the coils to keep the wire from moving. There was plenty of wax left to do that job after I melted out bulk of the wax that was basically filling the entire pickup cover. Although it defies my understanding of physics, it seems that getting the excess wax out helped the dynamic response of the pup, just as I had read on the interweb.
I had previously gone in deep enough to find the connection between the two coils and pulled the leads so I could try both parallel and single coil operation. Neither was that great, so I wired it back into the standard series humbucker wiring configuration.
The only other mod I might want to try is replacing the ceramic magnet with Alnico. I have not been able to find an Alnico magnet of the right dimensions (about 1/8" thick and about 3/8" wide), so that may not happen
It's a very nice sounding jazz pickup for not much money. Like most Johnny Smith pups, it emphasizes the more airy acoustic personality of an archtop, rather than making the super fat mellow humbucker or Charlie Christian pup sound. But you can roll the treble down and get a pretty fat tone
too. It's not a very high output pup, so you can run a Tode without much feedback and still get a nice clean jazz sound with the added harmonic warmth of low feedback.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2013, 06:24:57 PM by Doc B. »
Dan "Doc B." Schmalle
President For Life
Bottlehead Corp.
