Another budget semi-hollow.

[exiledarchangel]

This is the guys of the stock pickup. It is a single coil! A tall, thin coil (a bit like a Strat), with a ferrous blade and two fairly substantial (ceramic?) magnets on the back. The whole thing is encased in a block of wax.

The magnets must be in a P-90 configuration (same poles against the blade), very interesting pickups! Have you checked the DC output?

These new pickups level walls! I took a wee photie of the guts. They are basically a little like chunky PAFs with 8 slugs (no screw poles) and, oddly, no spacers under the outside edge of each coil. This means that the coils are actually in a subtle V formation, as the are pivoting slightly on the magnet in the middle of them. Oddly the neck pickup was slightly hotter than the bridge pickup.

I think its better to swap the pickups, put the neck pickup in bridge position. Are those 4-wire?

The covers were held on with double-sided tape. No solder blobs on the baseplate.

Better solder those covers, maybe you don't have problems now but tape can be defective after some time and you may get rattles etc.

[Alanko]

I'm thinking that my soldering iron takes too long to get everything up to temperature, but I can have a bash at soldering the covers. Swapping them about is a good shout.

The Epiphone/Pearl pickups have two wires + shield. The start and end of both coils are nicely demarked with a metal lug/eyelet (I think the same thing was used on the WRHB I previously showed on here). The first coil is soldered at the coil-end eyelet to the brass baseplate with thin, un-insulated wire. The start of this coil is connected to the end of the second coil with a short white jumper wire. A second white jumper wire starts at this eyelet (end of second coil), traverses the length of the coil and runs down the hookup cable. A second, red, wire runs from the start of the second coil, and the screen for the hookup cable is also soldered to the baseplate near the start of the second coil. Between the screen and the white wire the DC resistance was half of that between the screen and the red. Not a full four-wire configuration, though setting one up would be easy. I don't like switches that cut the output from a pickup as I tend to run a fairly 'set and forget' setup and don't want to be worrying about the output dropping. As such I deleted the white wire when I re-wired the pickups.

I never checked the DC resistance of the Aria pickups, and I only took them apart to rob the hookup cable (I bought some of Ebay that turned out to be twin audio cable).

[Granny Gremlin]

That stock pup looks interesting. 

[exiledarchangel]

Yeah, those reminded me a bit of the G-3 pickups, ofcourse with a different magnet structure on the bottom. I thought if their DC is low enough (on the 5k-6k range) they could be installed in a bass in series like a G-3 and get a nice fat yet articulate sound of them. Well, in theory anyway.

[Alanko]

I melted some wax into the covers of the Epiphone/Pearl pickups to keep the covers on. My soldering iron takes far too long to heat the baseplate.

I will try and measure an Aria pickup later.

[Alanko]

I'm onto phase three (at least) with the Aria now. I made the pickguard myself:

[Rob]

Looks great!

[Pilgrim]

Indeed!  Love the color and the look.

[Alanko]

Cheers guys! it is now set up with a volume per pickup, a master tone and a bass-cut on the bridge pickup. This shunts a 4.7 nF cap in series with the bridge pickup. This changes the tone from a scooped Jazz bass type affair to one with a bit more mids content.

I have a Vantage ES-355 copy in need of a total rewire, so this has been good practice with getting pots and wiring in and out of semi-hollow instruments! I wired the bass so that each pickup and volume half met, electrically, at the tone control. This means that I can pull each pickup and circuit half without too much grief.

[dadagoboi]

Looking good!