Help! Magnet swap gone awry on a DiMarzio humbucker

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Dave Locher
Posts: 155
Joined: Thu Feb 02, 2012 2:56 pm

Help! Magnet swap gone awry on a DiMarzio humbucker

Post by Dave Locher »

So I watched a few videos on YouTube, and decided to put an alnico 5 magnet into my DiMarzio super distortion humbucker pick up. I am hoping for less harshness and to make it sound more like my 1978 Ibanez V-2 pickup, which was a copy of the Dimarzio only with Alnico 5 magnets rather than ceramic.

Anyway, I opened up the pickup and immediately ran into two problems. The ceramic magnet is narrower than the A5, which means the A5 will not fit between the poles. Problem number two is that the ceramic magnet is also two or three times as thick as the A5, which means even if I could put it in there between the lugs, when I try to tighten down the base plate it's going to bottom out on the pole pieces long before the magnet hits the bottom of the coils.
Can this swap be done? Or should I just buy another pickup and forget it?
Could I stack the Alnico magnet between the ceramic and the base plate? If so, would it actually change the tone much?

I thought I was being really clever but I very quickly fell in over my head!
Jason Rodgers
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Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2012 4:05 pm
Location: Portland, OR

Re: Help! Magnet swap gone awry on a dimarzio humbucker

Post by Jason Rodgers »

What are the dimensions of the ceramic? To avoid mucking around too much and screwing something up, try to find an AlNiCo with dimensions as close as possible on mojotone, allparts, guitarpartsusa, or philadelphialuthiertools.
-Ruining perfectly good wood, one day at a time.
David King
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Joined: Sat Jan 07, 2012 10:01 pm
Location: Portland, OR
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Re: Help! Magnet swap gone awry on a DiMarzio humbucker

Post by David King »

You can take two Alnico bars and stack them in parallel N-N and S-S. To reduce the width you can grind them down with a N or P-100 dust mask on a coarse grinding wheel. Cobalt is considered a dangerous material to breath in. It's very time consuming to grind as the material is very hard.
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