Staircase porn and a gratuitous Lo-Z family photo

[66Atlas]

I love a good mystery.  Where is Angela Fletcher when I need her.

I had assumed that the two leads were the finish of two coil windings, I would think I would need one more wire to have a true coil tap correct?  I'm no expert on pickup wiring and probably know only enough to be dangerous.

Wouldnt 400 ohms be way to high for a lo-z pickup?  for some reason I thought I the stock pickups were well under 100 ohms.  I did wonder if it was some sort of reference to the number of windings, 200 per coil, 400 overall?  I does look like it's a heavier gauge wire coming off the coil but even then 200 seems kind of low for a number of wraps. 

I'll look into that stewmac polarity pen,  If I have a little time this weekend I may pull the pickup out again just to have a better look at it and test it's actual rating.

[Granny Gremlin]

Any ideas what the 400/200 means?

DC resistence maybe? 3 terminals/wires out of the pickup = 2 hot (vs 3 hot taps like on the original LP Bass pickup) + cold/ground.  400 and 200Ohms seems about right compared to both the original bass pickups DCR(s) and the labeling on the control plate of the LPSig (50, 200 and 500)....

http://archive.gibson.com/Files/schematics/LPSig.Bass.PDF

hmmmn, nope, the 3rd lead is the magnet ground (vs signal ground).  Measure the DCR of that thing - is it even LoZ?  The LoZ output seems to be all going through the transformer with 3 taps corresponding to the knob options, while the pickup direct to the second jack appears to be the HiZ out.  Also, the way the pickup is drawn it may be a single coil (which would explain why it doesn't take up all the space inside that cover).  Gibson did sometimes draw humbuckers as a single coil but not anywhere else I recall seeing where they also drew the poles and the magnet in - if they were lazy there were proper lazy.  This said, that original pickup could have been a completely different animal from the later rectangular one represented by the schematic.

Pickups , switches, and  transformer are all the same parts on the bass and the guitar versions (guitar schem: http://archive.gibson.com/Files/schematics/LPSignature.PDF ).

[Grog]

Gibson literature lists the pickups a humbuckers, but I've run into conflicting info before.



I bought two NOS Gibson Marauder bridge pickups because they look like a smaller version of the Les Paul Recording pickups. Half of the info I came across, much of it Gibson advertising, described them as humbuckers. Schematics & some of the descriptions list them as single coils, three times as powerful as many of the single coils on the market at the time. The  Marauder & Les Paul Signature were marketed about the same time & Bill Lawrence is said to have designed the pickups for both.

[doombass]

That's a really rare Sig you've got (staircase looks great also). I searched like crazy (with no luck) to find an actual customer specimen besides the promo bass when I bought this pickup:






From this thread: http://bassoutpost.com/index.php?topic=570.0

[Granny Gremlin]

And that is exactly why the thought these had the standard LP Rec pups in them (this is one, I would wager); I remember that thread now.

This one here is not the same pickup though (and the colour of the epoxy is the least significant of the differences ;P).  Interesting transition between the original pickup and the eventual square one (nevermind the Epi JC Sig which, again, looks the same as the LP Sig but I doubt is on the inside). ... in fact, I could not see this before, but that small rectangular impression there in the second pic (that I can now see on my monitor at home) seems curiously similar in size/shape to the bobbins for the G3/S1 pickups (the LP Rec pups had ovular bobbins whose flanges were sized to fit those covers better - we've seen those NOS on ebay and they often poke out of the epoxy a bit in bits; the white epoxy one is one of the cleanest I have seen aside from Les's original prototypes which have no covers, I doubt it was mass produced in the same way; could be the only one )... and the square LP Sig pup was a Bill Lawrence design you say (just like the G3/S1)... maybe a single coil after all.  Really curious about DCR now.

The only similarities between LP Rec and G3/S1 pups I know of: blade pole pieces and used on both guitar as well as bass models (and they didn't suck in either application).