repairing/rewinding vintage gold foil pickups?

[jbuonacc]

[ok, serious business here...]

i've got a handful of 60s japan gold foil pickups here that aren't functioning properly, if at all. can these be repaired or rewound? do people work on these old designs? do you think there would be any noticeable difference in the sound of one that's been rewound compared to a functioning original?

here's what they look like:



i'll add some interior pics as soon as i can, but i'll try to explain... the casing is in two parts, the flat metal base and the "hood". riveted to the base is a metal bar with six screw holes that runs up the right side. to the left of this is the magnet and windings, wrapped in some sort of paper. two twat-hair sized wires lead out of here - one soldered to the shielding and base, and the other soldered to the conductor and covered up with some sort of primitive heat-shrink tubing. the gold foil paper and metal hood go on over this, and the six "pole piece" screws secure it together along with metal fold tabs underneath.

i think i've figured out what the problem is, at least with some of them. the wires coming out of the packet are a bit long and are tucked between the packet and the metal base. the base is corroded, (possibly from the adhesive used to hold the packet together? weird that they'd all rust like that from external moisture, but that could be the case.) which ended up basically rusting the tiny wire. do you think i might be able to snip back the wire, or maybe try to fish a bit out of the winding and re-solder them to the conductor and ground? is it all as simple as it looks? i'm not sure how "fragile" pickups are, or what might cause them to malfunction.

[Zack]

which wire, the ground & the positive coming from the pickup or the coil wire?

If it's the former you could rewire the connections if anything else is working. It just depends on where the connection is (if it's directly attached or with rivets like modern pups). I have a pair that I could look at, but they're styled differently, I don't know if construction / ohmage varies.

[jbuonacc]

which wire, the ground & the positive coming from the pickup or the coil wire?

ahh, good question. the wires with obvious corrosion that i mentioned are the +/- wires, the coil wire is wrapped inside paper and those two are sticking out of that. haven't opened up the paper to look inside yet, not sure if i might further damage anything by doing so. i mean, can you handle the bare coil with no problems? you just want to make sure not to damage any strands, right? i'm not sure how the =/- are connected to the coil wire. could the =/- just be the two ends of the coil and they're not "connected" to anything inside there? i do have one that's been stripped, the magnet is rectangular with rounded ends and a hole through it near each end.

just got in from work, i'll try to play around with it over the next few hours and see what i find...

[jbuonacc]

i think i'm having a bit of luck so far. looks like two of them just had loose/disconnected ground wires, and i think i at least got them working. the one that i cut back the one wire on seems to be working a bit now, but i can't remember exactly what it was doing before i started (whether it was completely dead, or just very quiet). either way, the three that i've "fixed" so far all have very low output compared to some of the others that i have here.

i'll try to get some of them installed over the next day or so and see what's up.

any idea what would cause the output to be low on some? it's like it's so low that it doesn't register on the meter. the "normal" ones read about 5.5k.

[Zack]

Super low output could be a due to a break or crimp in the coil. If the solder connecting the ground or positive isn't a solid connection then that could also be the issue.