Aria pickup rewind
I'm a huge fan of these old Trapezoid Aria/Matsumoku pickups in both guitars and bass versions. They have really good output and a great broad frequency response. Of course, all vintage pickups are starting to get to an age where the wire insulation is breaking down and causing issues so we're going to see more and more rewinds happening going forward. The trick of course is the try and get them as close to original as possible.
I don't really deal with rewinding "common" pickups unless no-one else can/will help. I prefer to do the rarer and more unique vintage stuff, especially where there aren't direct replacements like Fender and Gibson stuff that drops straight in without modifying the guitar.
This late 60's Matsumoku made violin bass needed the neck pickup looked at as it had no output. After checking the usual suspects (pots, switch, wiring etc) it was time to dig into the pickup itself.
I've rewound quite a few of these pickups over the years and being a huge vintage Japanese fan, I've seen inside lots of pickups from Aria, Teisco, Guaytone etc and despite what people think, for the most part they're really well made, and some are quite revolutionary in their design and execution.
These however are "fairly" straight forward. The cast plastic bobbin holds the windings and the internal ceramic magnet with threaded steel cap to hold the very shallow pole pieces. It's an interesting way of making a pickup as it has a blade type construction with adjustable poles, which is quite rare.
After unwinding a few turns to see if there's a break close to the output, I decided I was going to have to dig deeper and cut the wire off.
After measuring the wire and determining it was AWG43 I just wound the coil to the approx. size of the original. This always gets you close if you don't have exact specs and being a neck pickup, I wound it a tiny bit under the original bridge pickup which was about 9.4K
With the coil rebuilt I measured it at 8.8K and decided that would balance nicely with the bridge pickup. I attached the lead wires and wrapped the coil in cloth tape to protect it.
