Making humbuckers from singles

[thebigz]

In one of the classifieds threads, Newc mentioned making humbuckers from single coils. How exactly is this done? I have a couple cool sounding singles, but I'm just not big into the singles, so it would be pretty cool to make a humbucker out of them. They are Jackson J125s.

Talking with my friend about it, our guess is to flip one 180 degrees, solder them to a humbucker base plate and join the wires. Would this do the trick?

[DonP]

Take a regular single and match it up with a RWRP middle.

If you have a MIM Strat, you can do it cheap. The one thing with a MIM strat is that when humbucking in the 2 and 4 positions, the pickups are wired in parallel, less output than if wired in series. So you can try a MIM strat, but you can get more output if you rewire the thing.

[Matt_B]

Talking with my friend about it, our guess is to flip one 180 degrees

That will only reverse the windings (in respect to each other) but not the polarity of the magnets.

If it's a traditional single coil with pole pieces that are magnets, you have to take out the pole pieces/magnets and flip them. If the single coil has a bar magnet then you just need to rotate it it 180 degrees.

[Newc]

Mine have the magnetic rods/poles, not a bar, so as Matt_B said, just pop them out and flip them over.

Since the bobbin for a single coil includes the baseplate, you can't separate the coil from it (which is why it's best to use older Jackson singles that are oval and not triangular-baseplate types).

Find a humbucker baseplate (StewMac or an old junky import pickup) and remove everything from that, then cover it with electrical tape to prevent shorting out the metal contacts on the singles, then tape the singles to the baseplate and to each other.

It might look kinda "homemade", but it'll work.


And you really want to use a baseplate that you know you have mounting screws for.

I hooked mine up to a Duncan TripleShot ring so that handles all the wiring/switching options, but if you saw the other thread I made about it, you can wire each pickup together as a humbucker without the TripleShot.