Pickups in Newwark St Starfire III

cc_mac

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Neither 5mm nor 10mm can be a correct value, same for such extreme height of the polepieces over the pickup.
/QUOTE]

That wasn't exactly what I was saying. There is about 1/2" ( roughly 12mm) of travel from string bottom to pickup ring top. I'll rake some pics later to illustrate what I mean. Current setup below. Thank you for the other information.

 
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cc_mac

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Ralph, my early morning guessimate was inaccurate. The distance from bottom of low E string to top of pickup support ring is is 8.5 mm. The pickup will adjust to almost flush with the support ring.
 
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Winnie Thomas

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I have a Starfire 4 that I got from Synchro in a trade. The pickups are similar to what has been reported here

Neck: 7.42K

Bridge: 5.1K

They are balanced., however and neither one is louder than the other. Plenty of "Twang" and "Snap"
 

Synchro

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I have a Starfire 4 that I got from Synchro in a trade. The pickups are similar to what has been reported here

Neck: 7.42K

Bridge: 5.1K

They are balanced., however and neither one is louder than the other. Plenty of "Twang" and "Snap"

Thanks for posting those measurements, Winnie.
 

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Hopefully, that will be corrected by Cordoba pretty quickly. That lead pup is just awful next to my original 1968 SF III. Doesn't sound good in the NS Starfire 4 and it's a huge disappointment in the T-400. No drive at all. I can almost guarantee that is why the S-100s don't sell.
 

Walter Broes

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Weird they seem to measure that in all the guitars, the "wrong way around". Something went wrong, or they went with that as "the spec", and that would have been strange.
 

gilded

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A few questions:

Has anybody measured the Newark Street Reissue pickups isolated from their harness, or is everyone just measuring through the jack?

Are the neck and bridge pickup pole-adjustment screws identical in terms of pole piece spacing or does the bridge pickup have wider pole-spacing than the neck pickup?

Has anybody switched the pickups (placed the bridge pickup in the neck position and vice versa)?

Thanks, gilded
 

Harpymorgan

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Gilded may be onto something with the spacing. When pictures of the M75 with mini humbuckers were originally released the string spacing bore no relation at all to the pole position of the pickups. That may have been photoshopping on the promo pics of course but its worth checking.
 

SFIV1967

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When pictures of the M75 with mini humbuckers were originally released the string spacing bore no relation at all to the pole position of the pickups.
Well, the Newark St. M-75 has Franz copies, not mini humbuckers. So looking at the S-100 for instance the strings seem to be more or less directly over the pole pieces:

iCKBDvfWKauMX.JPG



EDIT: O.k., you are talking the GSR M-75, now I found what you talked about!:

278815_2.jpg


Ralf
 

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The M-75 GSR that I briefly had was very obviously misaligned. And all of the lead pickups were too underwound for me to deal with.
 

Harpymorgan

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Its a pity if they have screwed up the reproduction of the mini humbuckers. A few people have commented on the sweet sound from my Bluesbird humbuckers. Incidently I turned them round so that the pole pices are inboard of both the bridge and neck to take a little bit of the bite out of the neck pickup.
 

JohnW63

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So, the lower ohms on the bridge pick-up means they are not as loud as the neck pickup. That would mean, when both are in use, the neck pickup would be more dominant. But, since the bridge one has more of a sharp tone, I would bet that if they WERE wound equally, the bridge would dominate the sound. Perhaps, they are wound the way they are so that they sound more balanced when played in tandem ? I for one, don't want my guitar to sound too twangy , but more mellow or jazzy, so it works fine for me, that way. I guess, if they were equally "hot", I would control the balance with the volume knobs.

Unless I am missing something....
 

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It was not underwound on purpose, it was a flat-out screwup. Nobody vetted the pups they sent to be reproduced and the lead pup had a short in it. Mini-buckers aren't supposed to be wound that low. Remember that Guild was always chasing Gibson, not Gretsch.
 

Zelja

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So, the lower ohms on the bridge pick-up means they are not as loud as the neck pickup. That would mean, when both are in use, the neck pickup would be more dominant.
It doesn't really work that way. When 2 pickups are in circuit (in the normal parallel wiring) - the signals of the two pickups when used individually are are not simply added together. What happens is that electrically they basically become one pickup sensing the strings at 2 points. The inductance of the two pickups together actually reduces (it would be exactly half if both pickups had the same inductance) and as a result you get the brighter, thinner more hollow tome which is typical for the middle position (both PUs on).

By having a weaker bridge pickup you are actually making the combined inductance lower than if the bridge was stronger.

The above is with all knobs on full. You are right that if you can effect the signal by turning down the vol knob off one pickup which greatly reduces the combining effect.
 

Walter Broes

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So, the lower ohms on the bridge pick-up means they are not as loud as the neck pickup. That would mean, when both are in use, the neck pickup would be more dominant. But, since the bridge one has more of a sharp tone, I would bet that if they WERE wound equally, the bridge would dominate the sound. Perhaps, they are wound the way they are so that they sound more balanced when played in tandem ? I for one, don't want my guitar to sound too twangy , but more mellow or jazzy, so it works fine for me, that way. I guess, if they were equally "hot", I would control the balance with the volume knobs.

Unless I am missing something....
You're missing something.

There's a lot more string energy at the neck than at the bridge. This is why when pickup makers do build calibrated sets of pickups (something that probably wasn't done until the 80's), the neck pickup is usually a little underwound compared to the bridge.

If both pickups are exactly the same, and you don't back off the pickup height (distance from the strings) on the neck pickup, you'll have an overly loud neck pickup when switching between pickups.

Having an underwound bridge pickup would only exaggerate this effect.
 

JohnW63

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Zelja,

So they are wired in parallel then ? Product over the Sum calculation for resistance.

Walter,

There certainly is more string movement at the neck, so that would induce more signal out of the neck pickup. All things being equal. Would the listener hear it as louder, when compared to the higher pitched bridge ? I know the higher frequencies can be more piercing on a PA system. I'm just trying to see if there is a valid reason for the different windings on the two pickups. In this day and age, there is little reason for a 30% variance in something built by machines.

For what it is worth, I measured my two pickups on the X175 Manhattan and got 7.1K and 6.98K . It would be more accurate to pull each one out and measure it, given there are other things in the circuit.
 

JohnW63

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Yes. However, if the all the pick-ups were made wrong, due to one example having a short, wouldn't all of them be wrong ? Besides, once they built a prototype, wouldn't someone have said, " Wait a minute. This isn't right ! " Yet, not all of the pickups are wound wrong, so... did they figure it out later ? I also find it hard to believe that they found one example of a guitar, measured the pickups, and just went with what they saw. There MUST be specs and paper work and perhaps patent papers to refer to.

If Guild were still running in CT, would we have a recall issue here ? Since they are not, does Cordoba have some liability or does this go back to Fender ? Which customer service do you call ?
 

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All of the bridge minibuckers are wound wrong. I have this straight from gurujr. Fender is such a big corporation that NOBODY checked them. They just bought a pair from ebay and nobody checked them. When we checked them here and found out that the bridge pup was fuxxored, it caused chaos at Scottsdale.

I have this from the horses mouth and I made sure that Oxnard knew about it.

There are other developments in the works at Oxnard and I have no doubt this will be rectified.
 

JohnW63

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So, your telling me that Fender, with all it's money, and access to ALL of Guilds records, relied on some anonymous eBay seller to base the whole vintage reproduction of pick-ups for the WHOLE line mini humbuckers for the Newark St guitars ?! Then they built some and never figured out there was a problem by PLAYING them, and sent them into production ?

I would find it much easier to believe some one typed a spec wrong and sent it to the pickup subcontractor. But , if you got it from someone reliable, then I have to believe the idiocy.

I'm glad my guitar has Franz reproduction pickups.
 
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