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First I remove the strings and completely mask off the instrument so I don’t spray any cleaner or lubricant on the finish or hardware. To get rid of the debris I often use a fine bristle tooth brush that is moistened and gently scrub the pole pieces or bridge saddles. I also use a small…

When removing your pickups or doing any work on your instrument I always remove the strings before doing anything. This will help the pickups, switches and coils from getting snagged on the strings. So many rewinds I do are from anxious players or repairman trying to change pickups without removing the strings. This also helps…

So many times I go into a hot club and I see the players guitar case lying open in the hot dressing room. I find that keeping a case open will absorb all kinds of moisture and humidity. I would trying finding Desiccant packets that you can place in your guitar case to help remove…

Reworking someone else’s work can be double the trouble. If an unqualified works on your pickup, they can break or modify the components making for a quality repair. I’ve seen pickups with magnets ground, bobbins glued with epoxy, bobbins drilled, tapped, burnt, bent, gouged, cracked, exchanged, painted, dyed, shrunk and dozens of other bad modifications….

The square or round holes are tooling holes and are used for exiting some beginning wires on various model pickups. The old Patent Applied For humbuckers used the square hole on the bottom end of the bobbin to exit the beginning hookup wire from the coil. Later the square hole was removed on the “T”…

If you got all the water out of the controls and pickups soon enough it should be OK. Water can damage all the ferrous metal parts and can even cause the magnets to rust. Using a warm hair dryer to evaporate the moisture will reduce oxidation in the metal parts. Leo Fender was clever when…

I often get pickups in that look like they have been used to pickup debris from the bottom of the ocean. To loosen the ferrous debris you need to remove the magnetic field they the objects attract to. On humbuckers it is easy to remove the bar magnet and use compressed air to blow away…

I would carefully remove the magnet and remember how it was taken out. There is usually a black line on one edge of the bar magnet that usually designates the North polarity and faces the stud side of the coil. Having access to a table mounted motor and fine bristle wire wheel will usually do…

Stringmaster Steel Guitars were made with either 6 or 8 strings. The instrument had pickups similar to old Duo-sonic and Musicmaster Guitars. They had Alnico rod magnets cut to .625″ and diameter of .192″ in the early models down to .187″ in the later ones. The pickups were flat on top and the ground end…

A patent is a government grant that allows the inventor to make, use and sell for a certain amount of time. It gives the inventor exclusive right to an invention or discovery. To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be new, useful or improvement of an existing patent. All patents other than design…