History of Thunderbird pickups
 

I couldn't gather this from the web. Polling forum wisdom.

The Thunderbird pickup design changed a couple of times. Does anybody have details about when what changes happened:

• The first construction IIRC was flat-lying coils with a bar magnet inside the coils (which means no polepieces), using Alnico. Just like the Firebird pickups
• Then there are additional plates of magnetic material (steel?) that reshape the magnetic field
• That seem to have change to various other humbucker constructions. This photo of a 1992 points to passively magnetic polepieces in the coils and magnet(s) on the bottom
  http://forums.vintageguitarandbass.c...d-Bass-Pickups
• Today's pickups are ceramics. When did that start? With the 1987 reissues?

This is a great post, which I might want to bump later.
http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f8/gib.../#post10747632

Unfortunately it isn't clear on which variants of Thunderbird humbuckers had upright coils and which one had face-to-face coils. Anyone knows?

As a mildly crazy question, how close would the Carvin soapbars (the ceramic humbucker version) come to current production Thunderbird sounds? I would be interested but since Carvin has decided not to make their soapbars compatible with regular Thunderbird style soapbars you'd be stuck with theirs.