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The pickup on my guitar died


mbengs1

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I needed to raise the height of the pickup to get more output and sustain so I unscrewed the pickup from the body and put a layer of foam under the pickup. I screwed back the pickup into the body and I didn't get any sound. There's no sound coming out. The bridge pickup and middle pickup still work. The neck pickup just died. What happened to the pickup?

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No wires got pulled out of place. Everything seems normal. Just the sound is very weak. almost no sound at all. It's a Seymour Duncan single coil neck pickup and in the bridge is a dimarzio super distortion. Maybe combining pickups from different companies causes one of the pickups to break?

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Maybe you flexed the base plate enough with the pressure from the the foam to break the solder joint inside the pup. Those little wires can be fragile.

 

how thick of a piece did you put in, how stiff is it, and how much did you compress it?

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I needed to raise the height of the pickup to get more output and sustain so I unscrewed the pickup from the body and put a layer of foam under the pickup. I screwed back the pickup into the body and I didn't get any sound. There's no sound coming out. The bridge pickup and middle pickup still work. The neck pickup just died. What happened to the pickup?

 

how is the pickup mounted in the guitar?

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I would suggest you reverse the procedure and see if the p-up comes back to life...as if by magic...the other possibility is you raised the pickup too close to the strings and the field is above the string level...;)

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Just to confirm that you didn't use the black conductive foam from a semiconductor pack?

 

That's what I was thinking too, that M. used some kind of conductive foam, and it's shorting out the pickup. I've seen some humbuckers where the coil terminals are exposed on the bottom.

 

Remove the foam, see if the pickup comes "back to life". I'd cut out a rectangle of this cardboard to act as an insulator between the foam and pickup, or find another piece of foam.

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For a typical single coil pickup the following works often.. if its a Humbucker or similar constructed pickup.. it take s a bit more understanding of the construction...

 

just take a solder tool and touch the two contact points on the bottom of the pickups, adding just enough rosin core solder to facilitate the solder flowing...

 

the way pickups are made... the 42 AWG wire is coated with a plastic coating... since the wire is so fine it cannot be "scraped" off, the coating is designed to vaporize when the solder tools heat hits it... however when it vaporizes, there is some residue left, generally not enough to compromise the solder connection with the pickup leads, but sometimes Mr Murphy does his thing... and one of the contacts can be only marginally functional. There is really no practical way to test fro such joints... a pickup checks out as good or not so..

 

it may work for years, but with the constant avalanche of vibrations from handling the guitar AND from the strings... ( or removing it, putting foam under it and remounting it) the already weak contact can "let go"... simply reheating, adding fresh solder and flux will restore it to like new... give it a try. This will not repair 100% of non functioning pickups, but it does restore a hellovah lot of them...

 

a solder tool is about 9 bux and a roll of solder a few bux... a new pickup is 80...

 

Ron Kirn

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