How to open a humbucker with a hammer

Issue 295 November 02, 2017

Here's a quick tip from Brian Michael at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto. He's got a fast and sure way to open this Golden Age Humbucker, without a soldering iron!

Video Transcription

[on-screen text reads: StewMac - How to open a humbucker pickup]

Brian Michael: Hi. I'm Brian Michael here at Gryphon Stringed Instruments, and today I'm going to show you my favorite trick for removing the cover of a PAF style humbucker.

I'll just simply get this [on-screen text reads: Golden Age Parsons Street Humbuckers - stewmac.com] in my vice with some light pressure on the ends, which also helps the sides of the cover want to splay apart. And it involves a hardware store pallet knife that I've sharpened and then it also involves a hammer, which is one of my favorite tools. And rather than use a soldering iron here to heat up the solder to remove the cover when I could possibly damage something, I like to use this sharp knife and just hit it because it allows me to just fracture the solder joint easily and quickly and then it leaves all the solder there for if I want to reattach the same cover.

And I'll take my pallet knife and just hold it at a diagonal angle so I'm hitting into my vice here, not sideways. And I'll just line it up and give it a whack, and there's one side. And I'll do the other side here [on-screen text reads: Fretting Hammer - stewmac.com]. And so we're loose. And sometimes if I loosen the vice a little bit, I can just slide this cover right off like that. There we go. Ooh, it's a double cream. Shhhh. Don't tell anybody.