P-90 Pickup Kits

Overall great kit, but the description indicates that dogear covers are available leading you to beleive they would actually work with this kit. Unfortunately the baseplate provided does not work with the dogear covers and there doesn't seem to be an option for the dogear baseplate from stewmac. Also, the screw heads of the adjustment screws strip out very easily and the brass screws heads snapped off leaving the body of the screw embedded in the bobbin. Both are probably my fault so take extra care when dealing with the screws.

These kits are great. I wanted the plastic bobbins but they were out of stock so I went with the maple and fiberboard kits. The instructions are perfect. I know some earlier reviewers had a hard time with fitting all the screws etc. Always test fit everything before gluing and assembling. The parts are tight fitting but they work really great. Run your polepieces through first to thread the holes in the maple to make things easier to assemble later.

I wound the neck pickup to around 10,000 winds and it read 8.35k. The bridge I did 10,600 winds and it read 8.6k. The bridge was not hot enough for my liking so I overwound it another 1000 winds (just solder a new piece of pickup wire to the end). Now it reads 9.75k and is smoking hot. It sounds really great. My guitar is mostly maple with black walnut so I didn't notice any real problems with treble loss on the overwound pickup.

These are great pickups. I think I'm more of a humbucker guy but for $17 each this was a really fun project to try P90s.

I also did the reverse wind reverse polarity on the neck pickup. Even though my bridge is a lot hotter than the neck it has a great hum cancelling middle position. Very useable. I'm using 500k pots with a 0.022uF paper in oil tone capacitor.

I bought two of these to put into a solid mahogany body guitar, they have great sound and were easy to put together. My friend works at a coil winding company so I had him wind the bobbins for me, but other than that I did it all and it was a snap.

I agree with the previous reviewer on the fiber/maple/fiber kit. The mounting screw holes in the maple spacer are too small, making it difficult to install them, which I didn't realize until after I had built my pickup. I had to take a hammer and tap the mounting screws through in order to remove enough wood material in order to allow them to pass through easily.

Also, the holes in the keeper bar for the polepieces are off as well, meaning the bar won't easily slip over the polepieces when mounting everything together. I had to slightly bore out some of the holes in the keeper bar so that they would accept the polepieces.

All of the materials in the kit are very nice. Sloppy fits in the maple spacer and keeper bar make installation a little bit of a headache, otherwise this kit would be 5 stars without question.

Holes in maple block misaligned with fiber bobbin holes, not perpendicular to outside surfaces and too small for the installation screws to pass freely.

Block warped after CA gluing. Pole piece keeper bar easily pulls from threads. Covers do not inset the installation screw heads, which looks weird. I would ask for an undrilled block next time so that I could align the holes to the lasercut bobbin, then drill to the correct size, spacing, and squareness for installation screw fit.

I customized the bobbin/cover so it's not really affecting the outcome, but I do have to adjust things I don't want to spend time on.

I have built several of these kits, both the fiber bobbin and plastic bobbin. Both are great, I really like the fiberboard kit, it is a stronger bobbin and easy to construct. But again, both kits are great, I highly recommend either.

I bought the fiber bobbin kit, which I built for Hans, the guitarist of the Norwegian band, Skambankt. The quality was superb! When I want highest quality p90 sound, I buy from StewMac.

I would like to be able to buy some of these parts separately. I have my own pole screws and keepers, baseplates etc. If you sold the parts separately I would probably buy them.