Here is my last completed project. I bought wome time ago a Peavey T-40 on ebay, without pickups. It was perfect for installation of a couple of Hagostrom bisonics or Dark Star, but I had no chance in finding them, so I decided to make myself two of them.
So I collected documentation to reproduce them and tried, however I found some great difficulties in two main points:
the lamination cores machining and the pole height adjustement mechanism.
I decided to give up with the pole height mechanism, the screws that you see are dummy, and replaced the lamination with ferrite beads, they should do the work of lamination, maybe even better.
I used 6 mm alnico poles, and alnico bars and handwinded single coil at about 5.4KOhm, (really hand winding, no coil winding machine of any type) and finally wax potted the pickups. Finally I created a wooden ring painted black including a classic humbucker height adjustement possibility.
Then I installed on the T-40, with series/parallel option.
My craftmanship skills are not great and actually the appearance is not the best, the main problem was removing the wax from the front of the PU, however the results was better that expected and the sound, well the sound to my ears is great!
I have no experience of the real thing however these pickups have a fat deep tone that I do not find in my other bass, and at the same time a great clarity. The volume is terrific, expecially in series configuration, and the frequency response great. I really like the sound that now is coming from this bass. I would be really curious to compare with some real Dark Star or Bisonic. Here are few pictures
I started this project about 5 months ago, and worked in the few spare time from work and during holiday,and used a drilling machine and a router to make the job essentially from plastic sheets, forbon, ferrite beads, alnico poles and bars, and AWG 42 wire.
