Reversing a mod on a spare pickup I got lying around

[Mrtoodamnsabre]

So I finally confirmed that this pickup was the last original piece of the electronics in my 1984 when I first got it but this pickups wiring has been changed. It was wired in series.

my question is can I reverse this, the original owner had removed the yellow wire that connects the two coils in parallel and attached a red wire to wire it in series. Is it possible to reverse this without the wire that’s supposed to snake into the little pickup housing. Can this be done without opening up the pickup?

This is the original wiring


Here is the new wiring

 

[dwizum]

Your pickup has 4 conductor wiring, you don't need to change anything at the pickup to wire it in parallel. You can see all 4 wires enter the end of the cable, but it looks like only three wires (red, black, green) come out the other end of the wiring. If the green wire is there, but hidden, you're all set. If the green wire is taped off or connected to something inside that cable, you can cut the cable open and figure out what needs to happen.

Your pickup has black and white on one coil, and red and green on the other coil. To wire it in parallel you just treat each coil as it's own pickup, so each coil gets one end on ground and one end on hot.

 

[Mrtoodamnsabre]

So it doesn’t have to be wired to anything under the plate it just being soldered to the back of the plate like that works? What I mean is even with those two wires disconnected from their original locations that setup should work?

 

[dwizum]

On both of the photos you're showing, you've got the same arrangement from an electrical perspective, but the wires are routed through different eyelets. I can't speak to the reason why - it may be that the factory switched the layout of the wiring, or someone rewound the pickups and happened to use different eyelets. The fact that the pickup works as-is indicates that the actual coil wires (on the other side of the "plate") are also routed to those other eyelets.

 

[Mrtoodamnsabre]

I’m a know nothing on this subject! So basically if the eyelets are on the left or right side it doesn’t make a difference or does the wire have to connect to where the pickup wire is connected to on the other side of the board via the eyelets themselves?

 

[dwizum]

The hookup wire on the outside of the pickup has to connect to the eyelet that has the coil wire on the inside of the pickup. But, that is true regardless of if the two coils are wired together in series or parallel. The fact that your pickup has four conductor wiring with the eyelets all on the left side means that the coil wires must connect to those left side eyelets, and with the four conductor wiring you can put it in series or parallel regardless.

 

[Mrtoodamnsabre]

Yeah hard to figure out if this is an original Sabre pickup or not, the wire colours match, but it’s all on the wrong side of the pickup, it would be the first year they made this pickup configuration so there might be some inconsistencies there, or weirdly enough maybe those other two eyelets connect? I’m not sure.

this pickup did work when they hooked it back up a while back, but the neck pickup turned out to be aftermarket, custom made by Kent Armstrong and crammed into the original pickup housing, I’d imagine that maybe this is a Nordstrom or something crammed into the former housing or a Kent Armstrong as well, but there’s no labeling on this one like the other making me think it’s original, the poles are longer though, so I’m not entirely sure. I think it would be hard to find bobbins the right size for the Sabre as the pickup housing is much smaller than the stingray.

The lever based pickup selector was introduced on sabres in about 83, so maybe alternative wirings with the pickup in order to accommodate the switch were done?

someone glued it back in place, but I’ve seen glued pickups from musicman before