G&L Legacy special - bridge and middle pickups dead.. :(

Hi all.
My 1997 G&L Legacy Special's bridge and middle pickups no longer make any sound..
well, the middle makes a very faint sound and the bridge none at all.

I opened the guitar up and took a look at the wiring, evrything is connected OK and keep in mind the neck pickup works well.

I put some contact spray on the pickup switch, and measured contacts with a multimeter, everything seems in order.

How do I diagnose the problem? can I open the pickups up ?
If the pickups are indeed dead, how do I get some new ones? I couldn't see them sold anywhere on the internet.

Thanks
Roey.

[Craig]

How do I diagnose the problem? can I open the pickups up ?

You probably won't see anything. Check the resistance with a multimeter. Even the cheapest one may do.

Check at the point, where the cables from the pickup are soldered to the switch and ground. The resistance value should be around 6 or 7 kOhm. If it's infinitely, the problem is at the pickup. If the value is right, the problem is at your switch.

Sometimes the contacts of the switch need to be bent a little for contact.

The pickups are available at the online store: http://g-l-online-store.myshopify.com/c ... ng-pickups

Too expensive though.

Last edited by Craig on Sun Jul 14, 2013 10:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Admin updated the G&L On-Line Store link

It's hard to believe that 2 pickups would die at the same time.. I'd guess it's either a bad pickup selector switch or broken solder joint..

I checked resistance between the reds at the switch and the black at the tone knobs,
The neck pickup (that works) has 5Kohm
The middle pickup has 200Mohm
the bridge pickup doesn't register any resistance.

I guess Miles Smiles was right and the pickups are gone...

I guess Miles Smiles was right and the pickups are gone...

I wrote: "The problem is at the pickup".

As long as the coil isn't broken, the pickup isn't really gone. So there's a chance, that the problem is just before the coils. Either it's the wire to the pickup or at the point at wich it's soldered to the coil wire. I have a Fender neck pickup, which had exactly a broken solder joint right there. There was nothing special to see, but the joint was cold. So I soldered it with respect to the very thin coil wire and it works since then.

I once got a set of Legacy pickups out of Tribute for about 60 €, so if you've no success, you could try to find used ones. On the other hand, there's nothing very special about that pickups, so any good Stratocaster pickups would do.

As I wrote, the original pickups are available at the on-line store, but 180 $ for all three, are simply too much, on the other hand, you may need only two.

[Craig]

How do I diagnose the problem? can I open the pickups up ?

You probably won't see anything. Check the resistance with a multimeter. Even the cheapest one may do.

Check at the point, where the cables from the pickup are soldered to the switch and ground. The resistance value should be around 6 or 7 kOhm. If it's infinitely, the problem is at the pickup. If the value is right, the problem is at your switch.

Sometimes the contacts of the switch need to be bent a little for contact.

The pickups are available at the online store: http://g-l-online-store.myshopify.com/c ... ng-pickups

Too expensive though.

The neck and middle pickup DC-R should be around 5.1K while the bridge pickup should be around 7.5K.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by Craig on Sun Jul 14, 2013 10:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Updated G&L On-LIne Store link

I checked resistance between the reds at the switch and the black at the tone knobs,
The neck pickup (that works) has 5Kohm
The middle pickup has 200Mohm
the bridge pickup doesn't register any resistance.

I guess Miles Smiles was right and the pickups are gone...

An alternative would be to have the pickups rewound. There are
All sorts of pickup builders offer this service, just google "pickup rewinding services".

Hope this helps.