Replacing pickups!?

[Tinky-Winky]

I think the best solution would be for you to enlist someone with experience to change your pickups, and then you could watch them do it, so that in the future you would be better equipped for the job. Certainly, if you are not confident, then it is unlikely the installation would be satisfactory.

[warren0728]

two words.....duct tape.....anything can be fixed with duct tape and you won't burn your fingers or melt your plastic!

ww

[Cranium]

Kay guys, a 20 watt soldering iron should handle the job? What type of soldering iron should I buy? They all have diffrent shape and such.

[Bloozcat]

I just looked at my old soldering iron that I've had for ages. It's a 25 watt Weller. A model SP23 or something...it doesn't matter, they probably stopped making that model about the time of the moon landings...

You want something like a pencil type soldering iron. Something with a relatively small, tapered (rounded) tip.

They cost less than $20.00 at Home Depot if I remember correctly.

Being the "make something out of nothing" type that I am, I took a coat hanger and twisted it into a kind of a spiral helix to hold my soldering iron. I've been using that thing for several years now...works fine. You may want to avoid the embarrasment of having to explain it to people, so you may want to just buy one when you get your new iron...

[Cranium]

Aren't you seposed to hold the soldering iron with your hands, or will I need some special gloves? Does the soldering iron come with a spunge and the solder and the stand or will I need to buy them seperatley? Where is the safest place to perform the operation? Sorry for all the questions


Edit: Sorry but I need to know, whats the diffrence between wiring a single coil like a humbucker or like a single, I heard some talk of pickups wired in HB mode and single but have no idea how to do it, could you please explain, I want to wire it in single coil mode.

[Bloozcat]

Aren't you seposed to hold the soldering iron with your hands, or will I need some special gloves? Does the soldering iron come with a spunge and the solder and the stand or will I need to buy them seperatley? Where is the safest place to perform the operation? Sorry for all the questions


Edit: Sorry but I need to know, whats the diffrence between wiring a single coil like a humbucker or like a single, I heard some talk of pickups wired in HB mode and single but have no idea how to do it, could you please explain, I want to wire it in single coil mode.

OK, let's start with the soldering iron. You can buy a fixed wattage iron (about 20-25 watts) for about $20.00. If you then add the stand and sponge pad you're looking at about $40.00 total...OR...you can buy a nice soldering station like this one for about $45.00:

WLC100 is the model. This unit is variable wattage from 5w-40w and will cover anything you're likely to encounter as a hobbyist. I'm not sure who carries this station, but I'd check the usual suspects first; Home Depot, Lowes, Ace Hardware, etc.

For solder, I'd recommend 60/40 tin/lead, rosin core. Having some paste flux around is a good idea also. You can buy this at Radio Shack.

Your DiMarzio Virtual Vintage pickup is wired like this:

Bare wire = ground
Green wire = ground
Black/White = Soldered together to connect active coil with dummy coil.
Red = Hot

So for a Strat type wiring scheme (and many others as well), you'd connect the hot wire (red) to the proper lug on the switch. The bare wire and the green together go to the common ground (usually the back of one of the pots). The black/white combination doesn't connect to anything else (and should be insulated to prevent grounding out).

If your current single coil pickup is wired with vintage type color coding, the pickup you're replacing should have a white wire to the switch, and a black wire to the common ground.

So, you're going to de-solder the original pickup wires from their terminals, and solder the wire from your V V in their place according to the above color coding.

It's pretty much that simple...other than removing the adjustment screws and springs to remove/replace the pickup itself. How to do that is pretty self evident when you look at the pickup as it sits in the pickguard.

Now if I was with OSHA, I'd tell you that you should wear flame retardant gloves, a long sleeve cotton (or flame retardant) shirt, safety glasses, a hardhat, and work with a flame retardant blanket under your work. Well I'm not with OSHA, so I'll tell you that the only things I mentioned that I do employ are the safety glasses and the flame retardant material under my work.

So...it's time to get started! Soon you'll be just like the rest of us crazy nut modders, tweaking everything you buy in search of the "Holy Grail" of tone...

BTW: Some very useful tools to have when you're soldering are a few pairs of hemostats in various sizes and shapes...those stainless steel clamping tools that surgeons use. You can usually find them pretty cheap at flea markets. They're great for holding wire and parts together while soldering. They will also come in handy later on as heat sinks when soldering capacitors and resistors in wiring circuits...but we'll save that for lesson #2...

[Tinky-Winky]

Mmm...that soldering iron station is provoking G.A.S....

[Cranium]

So Blooz if I wanted to route it like a single coil then I would just leave the black and white wire not connected to anything?

[Bloozcat]

So Blooz if I wanted to route it like a single coil then I would just leave the black and white wire not connected to anything?

This is the single coil size Virtual Vintage pickup we're talking about here and not the Virtual PAF, isn't it? If so, then this pickup has to be wired as a single coil. It's a "humbucker" only in that an extra (stacked) coil is incorporated in RWRP to cancel the hum. You can't seperate these two coils without creating a very noisy single coil (that would probably be very weak as well).

So yes, the black and white wire should not be connected to anything other than each other. The pickup should come from the factory with the black and white connected to each other with an insulated splice cap over the connection. Just pretend that the white/black wires don't exist...ignore them. Just connect the red to hot, and the bare & green to ground.

In the case of a full size, side by side coil humbucker, seperating the white and black wires would be done to "split", or actually "tap" one of the coils.