Following on from the several recent budget pickups threads I decided to go the complete extreme & ordered the cheapest Chinese no brand/name Humbuckers on ebay at £8 delivered.
They took 2 weeks to arrive, arriving Thursday (no wiring instructions).
As you can see they are 4 conductor "Zebra" humbuckers said to be Alnico V, 14-15k Bridge & 7-8K Neck.
I metered them & got 15.6k Bridge & 8.1k neck, which should put them in the "hot rodded" humbucker ball park.
I had recently been given this "V" FOC which I had already decided to swap all the hardware on as it all was pretty poor.
The "V" had already had a fret level/crown/polish & new Tusq nut fitted a week ago by John at Right Guitar Set Ups & Repairs for the princely sum of £30 !
Today I swapped the pickups & all the hardware.
I fitted Wilkinson EZ-LOK tuners from Vanson & roller bridge & stop tail, vol pots x 2, push pull tone pot, 3 way toggle switch & jack input all from Axetec, all in gold.
I also fitted gold strap pins I had lying around, moving the top pin to the front upper neck plate mounting to reduce neck dive.
Other than having to bend the pickup legs slightly, as the bobbins were fouling the pickup rings, the job was straightforward.
Hopefully tomorrow I will do the wiring for which I will use connector blocks so that I can swap pickups easily & quickly without having to do any de-soldering/soldering.
Oh I know the lawn is a mess.
Comments
They're probably going to be fine. I've got some SeiQ Rickenbacker-alike 'Toasterbuckers' which cost all of £19 each, posh compared to yours . They're fine - they sound very good, and the only slight problem with them is that they're a bit microphonic - but no worse than real Rick ones.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I have put them with the black part of the pickup on the inside, white outside as I prefer the look ?
I have seen several videos of extremely cheap pups versus expensive, Darrell Braun"s videos spring to mind, & generally the cheap pups sound pretty good to my ears.
I have several other sets of pups I want to try in this guitar, hence the chocolate blocks, before I decide on which set I am going to stick with.
So far the guitar owes me £30 for the set up & new Tusq nut, £8 for the pups, & if I had to buy the parts that I have fitted about another £75, so under £120 for a very playable "V".
It's very doubtful that the coils on such a cheap humbucker will be wound with any offset ... so it's likely to be cosmetic only. If there is offset ... with no wiring diagram, sorting out the weaker and stronger coils will be a job for a multimeter.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
For £8 I have nothing to lose, & really I only bought them as an experiment to see what sub £10 pickups sounded like.
I have seen videos of comparisons of $10 dollar pups versus Seymour Duncans etc & TBH the cheap pups have sounded good.
Maybe not as good but certainly very usable & really good value for money.
One of my favourite sounding pups are a set of Vanson 59 PAF"s which were only £30 the pair & I do have Seymour Duncans in a couple of guitars.
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
I am in no way saying these £8 humbuckers are as good as a £200 plus set but quite possibly they will sound OK.
Likewise they may sound crap.
If they sound crap it"s only £8 wasted & I am just genuinely curious as to how a pick up combo that costs £8 delivered sounds.
As it is the guitar will probably end up with an IronGear Dirty Torque/Blues Engine combo as that was my original plan for it & I already have them.
Certainly I can say that, to my ears anyway, my £60 IronGear Hot Slag/Rolling Mill combo is at least as good as my £200 Seymour Duncan JB/59 combo.
In fact I actually slightly prefer the sound of the IronGears.
In this Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf4xYCMtFVg the presenter A/B"s a $15 pair of Chinese HB"s against a $150 pair of Seymour Duncans.
I would say that the SD"s do sound slightly better but there is not a lot in it IMO & certainly not enough to justify the SD"s being 10 times the price.
Just my opinion obviously.
I spend my life making pickups, in fact I don't have much of a life outside pickups lol ... but this means I know exactly what makes a good pickup ... and it's not advertising budget, celebrity endorsements or fancy packaging ... it's good design, quality materials and care in production. Both of which are about equal between mass produced Far Eastern and mass produced US. In fact most US mass manufacturers use imported Chinese parts ...
Formerly TheGuitarWeasel ... Oil City Pickups ... Oil City Blog 7 String.org profile and message
I've always found Duncans and Dimarzio to be fine pickups but not worth their price tags, especially in comparison to pickups like Tonerider, GFS etc.
Baldy, I got 2 zebras so they look like your arrangement except the screws are the right way round. I will open up the cavity tomorrow and see how I wired them up. I followed a wiring diagram off the Internet but can't remember which brand they corresponded to.
Glad to know also that my investment of £7.99 wasn"t wasted either.
Bandcamp
Here is a link to the wiring diagram for you
https://imgur.com/a/PwGGtjb
If not, can I be the first? :P
Black & red when metered together give readings of 15.6k bridge & 8.1k neck, I am assuming black is "hot".
No other wires or wire combinations give any readings at all including splitting the white & green and trying them both together or separately ?
It probably helps to have some idea of what sound you are aiming for before purchasing. That way, you avoid amassing a drawer full of trial and error "errors".
The pickups in my Paul Reed Smith S2 Vela are made by G&B in Korea. They suit the instrument perfectly.
The original pickups from the S2 Singlecut that now houses my Winterizer II humbuckers went into a Asian-made SG copy where they sound as if they were made for that guitar.
Several of the best known pickup manufacturers use the same four conductor wire insulation colour codes but in different permutations.
For a long time, when answering guitar wiring questions, it has been necessary to post a link to the Seymour Duncan website Colo(u)r Codes Translation .pdf page. Eventually, somebody on t'Interweb took the liberty of expanding the SD page to cover several more manufacturers.
Irrespective the only 2 wires that give a reading are red & black is that correct ?
This convention holds good even if you rotate the bridge/Treble position pickup through 180 degrees to have its screw polepieces in the customary place.
Any fancy coil splitting and phase reversal shenanigans and you may need to rearrange the order in which you connect the conductors on the bridge/Treble position pickup.