Originally Posted by
Andy40
I agree with Simon.
The Chinese humbuckers are built with much much cheaper parts, the spacer between the bobbins and the baseplate is just plastic, they use machine wound poly wire and try to make up with it by charging ceramic magnets at a higher gauss, all metal used in the pickups are "Chinese pot metal". Oh and they are are not wax potted but there is some parrafin wax dropped on the bobbin before They solder the cover on. This recipe gives you pick ups that work, sure they will do their job, will they sound kick ass? not to me.
Toneriders are a great example of spending a few extra pennies and getting great pick-ups for your $$. Since you are in the US, I would use Mojotone Humbuckers. Sometimes Mojo will do free ground shipping in the US.
Here are some of the differences between the stock pickups and Tone riders or Mojotone:-
- All metal parts are made of Nickel silver
- the wire is usually plain enamel
- the bobbins are made from Butyrate
- there is a maple spacer and a keeper bar
- the Magnet will be Alnico type magnet
- they are usually wax potted properly in 80% paraffin wax and 20% bees wax.
The main difference to me, is the scope and amount of harmonic frequencies the pick up obtains from string oscillation, which in turn means the more tones I can play with using these pickups.