Oil City: 1970s Rickenbacker pickup restoration

OilCityPickups · August 2014

I mentioned elsewhere that I rewind a lot of Rickenbacker HiGain pickups ... here's a typical one sitting here as dead as a dead thing.

Plenty of mojo and playing wear on this-un! Also totally open circuit!
Below: you can clearly see the huge, but relatively weak 'rubberised' magnet that the coil sits on.

Off comes all that dead 44awg wire. This pickup has died for the same reason as many Rick pickups. The hair-fine start of the coil is crudely soldered to a sawn off brass screw driven through the bobbin base ... no strain relief, and it's ripped loose due to a bump or bash. Of course it is hopelessly buried in the core of the pickup, so a rewind is the only move. Cut to the chase ... I have put my own strain relief system into the bobbin and the rewind starts.

Wound and taped

Then back together with new double sided tape to attach the bobbin to the magnet before the screws go in

The moral here is take it easy with Rick bass pickups ... very crude construction can lead to a prematurely dead unit.

ICBM · September 2014

At least it's not a HB-2 humbucker, which are resin potted and so unrepairable if they die…which they are not unknown to do.

I love Rickenbacker instruments, but sometimes their insistence on doing things an old-fashioned/quirky/crude/idiosyncratic way, apparently for the sake of it, does drive me a bit mad!

OilCityPickups · September 2014

Bless em ... they help keep me in work!
I too love Ricks ... but talk about plowing a lonely furrow sometimes!

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Oil City: 1970s Rickenbacker pickup restoration

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