Un-potting pickups

ICBM

Look on the bright side... in the 1980s, following advice from Bill Lawrence in an old book, I potted the horribly microphonic and shit-sounding pickups in my Aria Strat-style guitar with epoxy resin - which was a time-consuming and very messy job involving a hairdryer (to heat and thin the resin so it would soak into the coils) and about a hundred sheets of kitchen roll. After all that work they were no longer microphonic, so that bit worked... but they sounded even more shit, and I quickly learned that these things are inversely related to some extent! And of course being epoxy, it was completely irreversible.

After that I bought some actual Bill Lawrence pickups .

NPP

Alegree said:

You're certainly not going to make any audible difference from any possible solutions to your issue.

point taken! So I'll keep the pickups as they are, and where they are - in the box with original bits removed from the guitar. At least I now know exactly what type of pickup they are. 

OilCityPickups

Alegree said:

NPP said:

Alegree said:

What are you trying to achieve by removing the wax?

returning them to a state closer to factory spec.

They may have been potted for a reason, but lots of things were being done in the 80s for reasons that, from today's perspective, weren't very good reasons. 

I haven't got sufficient experience to know whether unpotted pickups really sound more open etc. than potted ones (for lefties, it's always difficult to just check out stuff) and I wouldn't expect any magic transformation to occur just because of the removal of a bit of wax from a run-of-the-mill pickup. 

You're certainly not going to make any audible difference from any possible solutions to your issue.

Whether wax affects the sound of a pickup at all is an entirely different, and irrelevant, can of worms, but you're not going to end up with an unpotted pickup regardless. I'm afraid this is a futile endeavour for you.

Totally agree with this ... it's not worth the effort ... lol and no, I wouldn't want that red crap in my potting bath!!!!

CasperCaster

NPP said:

This site https://www.strat-central.com/70sstrats/index.htm#specs dates the serial number (S 869649) to 1978, but the fully shielded pickguard and pickups would date it to 1980. One of the pots which is out of the guitar has a 1978 number. Won't take the neck off to check the stamp but if the serial is '78 the neck stamp is likely to be the same ... I've read somewhere that lefties were just thrown together from what they had lying around and thus often have parts from various years. So I have a 1978-80 factory partscaster perhaps. 

I suspect that the pickups may be contemporary with the guitar. The X-1 pickup assembly was introduced with The Strat model in 1980 (the one with the atrophied headstock shape, painted to match the body) but made its way onto the standard stratocaster (still with late seventies CBS features; 3-bolt, big headstock, bullet truss rod nut etc) in the summer of 1980. I can't say I've definitely seen a 1980 stratocaster with an S8 serial number (usually S9 and E0) but a few 1981 guitars with S9, E0 and E1 serial numbers - serial number overlap between years seems common by this time, so certainly possible that the pickups are original, and the guitar is from 1980, especially as its a leftie, which have a different logo to right-handed models i.e. if Fender had plenty of left-handed S8 logo's in stock, why bin them to order new ones? Just a thought.