Humbuckers

[Rabbit]

1+ Somewhere on this board there is a hack to turn a 2 conductor humbucker into a 4 conductor. I tried it with the stock kit pickups and confirmed both your hypotheses: (1) Magnets are ceramic. (2) It's way easier to turn the a two conductor humbucker into a paperweight than to turn it into a four conductor pickup.

The soap bars and jazz bass pups are also ceramic. The process of making a two lead humbucker into a 4 lead humbucker would entail desoldering the coils and soldering leads onto the coils. That would require that there was enough coil wire slack and a lot of breath holding while you dealt with the hair thin coil wire that seems oh so much more fragile once wound . Given the quality of the pups if on a budget it would be better to just buy cheap chinese pups that would be pretty much as good as the kit pups but you would be able to get 4 lead humbuckers.

[fender3x]

The soap bars and jazz bass pups are also ceramic. The process of making a two lead humbucker into a 4 lead humbucker would entail desoldering the coils and soldering leads onto the coils. That would require that there was enough coil wire slack and a lot of breath holding while you dealt with the hair thin coil wire that seems oh so much more fragile once wound . Given the quality of the pups if on a budget it would be better to just buy cheap chinese pups that would be pretty much as good as the kit pups but you would be able to get 4 lead humbuckers.

Agreed. As it turns out the process is similar for making a pickup shaped paperweight, but the outcome is far more certain.