Gearhead
Question, but first background:
I bought a Epi LP Special at the pawn shop for a price I could not walk out on (Keira style). Played the thing a bit, had a terrible setup. Changed it but was now not convinced the pups were too good. Swapped the stock pups for EMG89/89R but was still not happy with the tone. Now the latest idea is to put my modified SD Custom Custom (swapped the A2 magnet for an A4 and whaddayeknow, shesgoodtogo) in the bridge and buy a new SD for in the neck. The plan so far is to use a Distortion and swap the magnet for an A3 (I know it's silly to second guess a renowned pupwinder but Seymour does not have my guitar). I would like the zebra look so I'm thinking of swapping pup covers. The Custom 4 (as it is now called) is black/black so I would need the Distortion to be Cream/Cream.
Would it be hard to swap the covers and wind up with two zebra's?
AlanRatcliffe
If I understand you correctly, there is one problem - they are not covers, but the bobbins themselves. No swapping bobbins without either having mismatched coils or rewinding from scratch.
Gearhead
"I'll go back to...
black.
black
black"
(Amy Winehouse)
Thx Alan, I should have looked better. You're right.
tonerider
You can create your own set of zebra humbuckers if you have a double black and a double cream one. You will have to unwrap the outer cloth tape from both humbuckers, find the soldered connection where the end of the first coil is connected to end of the second coil (wired out of phase), gently unsolder this and remove one bobbin from each pickup (you'll figure it out).
Next you just swap the two bobbins around, GENTLY re-solder the tap connections and re-apply the tape. Remember on a matched set the cream coils are normally the outer coils when looking at two zebra's mounted on the same guitar - so take note which bobbins you're removing and swapping.
It's an easy task and I've done this a few times myself. Don't worry too much about the variance in number of turns between the 2 new unequal sets of bobbins, it won't make THAT much of a difference to the sound, and anyway, the 2 new zebras will both have mismatched coils but will still share the same bar magnet, which kind of balances things out naturally. Individually the one coil might be louder than the other but this will probably make for an interesting-sounding humbucker. The difference will be more technical in impedance (KiloOhm) and in inductance (Henries) than sonically.
Good luck!
