Dickerson Pickup Redo

[Rick Aiello]

My kids got me a "Tulip" prewar Dickerson for Christmas. Its pickup had been redone, and the MOTS was hacked up pretty badly from digging out the original unit.



I removed the replacement pickup, which was a plastic bobbin cut to fit the little cavity . It was just set on top of the big, single horseshoe ...




It was originally magnetized so that the "faces" were opposite poles ... which left a dead spot in the center ... affecting strings 3 and 4 ... so I put it on the electromagnet and changed the orientation so that the faces were both South and the curve was North ... the output is now even across all strings.




Unlike the post wars ... this alnico horseshoe takes up the entire cavity except for about a 1/4" above the faces.





The original unit was an aircoil ... so I made a jig , wound an air coil and dropped it over a 1008 blade ...





The jack was changed from an amphenol to a standard 1/4" and placed where the volume pot was. No biggie , no real need for a volume control ... such a tiny pickup wound to 3.5 kOhm doesn't produce much output (but it is sweet sounding). I wound it with 43 AWG magnet wire.

Laid the blade and aircoil on the magnet and filled the entire cavity with wax ...



Put a little ground wire on ... put the hand-rest (which had a thick piece of sheet steel silver soldered on - to help bring up the field ) back on ... strung it up ... nice little steel guitar ... it's so very small (although it is a full 22.5")

[Tony Oresteen]

Great story! So how do you have it tuned?

[Rick Aiello]

E9 (hi to lo) E B G# F# E D

[HowardR]

I love these little MOT guitars......easy to tote & play.....and they can wail!.....

[Frank James Pracher]

I wound a pickup for one of my Magnatones. I opted to not use the horseshoe magnet and went with one from a lipstick tube pickup.. I made a carrier board out of a piece of veroboard and wax potted the whole assembly. I think I wound it somewhere between 3.5 and 4k. It sounds just like my other Maggies so I'll say mission accomplished.

[Rick Aiello]

Good job on the aircoil .... a lost art

I have an older Magnetone "pre-Lyric" D8 that utilizes aircoils around alnico pole pieces that are set into a wooden tray ... north seeking poles up inside the coil and south seeking poles up just outside the coil - in line with the magnets in the coil. A very interesting magnetic circuit

[Jeff Highland]

What is an aircoil?

[Rick Aiello]

By definition ... it's a coil of wire without a ferromagnetic core.

Once you slip it over a blade or pole pieces ... it's no longer an aircoil, technically.

They are found most often in electronics ... most all pickups these days are coils wound on bobbins containing some ferromagnetic material ... but in the early days Epiphone, Magnetone and a few others wound aircoils and then fit them with some sort of magnetic material ... Epiphone used Ricky style horseshoes (very strong magnets) and an aircoil with two blades that double as a mount (two tiny threaded holes in the bottom of the blades.)

Hope that helped ...

[Jeff Highland]

thanks

[Rick Aiello]

Here is a tune on the little Dickerson ... please ignore the barking

https://on.soundcloud.com/cyFA5BCz6wjgH6Dk8

[Pete McAvity]

Sounds great, Rick! Do you know if all of these little Dickerson/Magnatones w/ the hidden pickup are horseshoes? I picked one up about 10 years ago which was dead. Lucked out as someone had just futzed w/ the pots & wiring. Once corrected it sang, so I didn’t have to dig at the pickup. Pots were replacements, so I can’t place a birth year, but figure 60’s or older. It’s a “Santa Ana Music” badged little guy, so it was ordered as a teaching studio instrument from Valco.

[Rick Aiello]

That's a good question ... I don't know if they all had a horseshoe magnet providing the juice ...

Here's a 1957 unit (photo courtesy of Denny Turner)

[Pete McAvity]

Well, I guess I’m just gonna have to look into getting mine X-rayed (or forget about it & just enjoy the tone).