Project #2 - Pickup Replacement, Hamer "XT"

For this post I'll be recounting my recent pickup replacement job for my 2-humbucker guitar, made by Hamer, a manufacturer that's been around for almost 40 years. Or, at least it was around - according to Wikipedia, they were recently bought out by Fender, and Hamer's U.S. production guitars have been discontinued. Not sure what this guitar model is actually called, but the headstock says "XT Series", which was their "budget" line of guitars, built in China. I bought it 3 or 4 years ago at Sam Ash sort of on a whim, because it was so inexpensive. I believe the price tag said $249, which itself was a great price, but lucky me, I'd caught it on sale, so I ended up paying what I recall was $179! I wasn't at the store to buy a guitar that day, but since it was so reasonably priced I figured, "why not?"

Hamer "XT" Series Guitar.

These pickups gotta go...

The first thing about this guitar that caught my attention was the translucent black "burst"-type finish, over what appears to be a flame maple top. For a "budget" guitar, this thing looks GREAT. To my eyes, hanging on the wall in the store, it looked like a fairly expensive guitar. After seeing the price tag, I had to at least plug it into an amp and check out how it played.

I remember being particularly impressed by the all-around construction for a guitar at this low price range. The neck feels different than a standard Fender neck; a bit thicker, but still very comfortable in my hand. The action was smooth, and the frets were surprisingly finished quite well. The tuning machines and other hardware were pretty solid, no loose parts at all, as you may occasionally find on the cheaper guitars.

This guitar was just right for me, because I'd been looking for an affordable "Gibson-style" guitar as an alternative to my Fender guitars that I usually play. While I'd love to have a genuine Les Paul or ES-335, they are awfully pricey, more so than even most of Fender's American-made guitars, due to Gibson's fancier designs, overall. I still wrestle with that dilemma; should I or should I not slap down that much money for a Gibson? In the meantime, I'll have fun with my Hamer...

I bought the guitar knowing that the weak link in cheaper electric guitars tends to be the electronics: the switches, the potentiometers, the pickups. When I tested it out in the store, it sounded OK, if not mind-blowing. Again, because of the price, the fact that it felt great to play, and the overall construction of the guitar was very good, I didn't have a huge problem with it not sounding so great. I figured if the pickups or other electronic parts need replacing later on, I can do that myself.

Once I got it home and played it through my amp for a week or so, away from all the racket that goes on in the music stores, I confirmed that better pickups were definitely in this guitar's future. Months after that, I noticed that the bridge pickup really didn't sound very good at all, and buzzed LOUDLY, especially when I touched the metal pickup cover with my fingers. Hard to avoid, because that's exactly what my strumming/picking hand does when it rests against the guitar while playing. That told me there was something funky going on with the wiring, or possibly the pickup itself. The neck, or "rhythm" pickup played with no problems, but the overall sound to my ears was basically "so-so". Not horrible, but not great either. I felt that this guitar could sound much better if I replaced the pickups. Admittedly, the time elapsed between my decision to replace the pickups and actually getting down to doing the job was pretty long! After the bridge pickup started acting up on me, the guitar basically sat in my closet for a long while, until I made time to work on it. Once I started working on my other guitars again, this was the perfect time to get this particular job done, too.

I'd been buying guitar repair supplies and tools from StewMac recently, and they happen to also sell an affordably priced pickup line called Golden Age. They make pickups for both Fender-style and Gibson-style guitars. Since my Hamer was a budget-priced guitar to begin with, I figured I'd give these pickups a try. Most of their pickups are priced at just over half of what one would pay for the more well-known pickup brands, such as Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio. Golden Age seems to focus on reproductions of traditional, classic pickup designs, and have a lot of positive reviews on the StewMac site. Many have opined that they sound excellent for the price, so I felt pretty confident going with them.

Golden Age pickups - "Vintage vibe" at a decent price.

As I said, the Hamer has a 2-humbucker pickup configuration, with 2 volume potentiometers ("pots" for short, 1 per pickup), 1 master tone pot, and a 3-way switch. When I opened up the control panel on the back of the guitar, I found some wiring that was a bit different than what I've seen before. Instead of soldering the pickups' lead wires directly to the volume pots, they had these white plastic connectors, going to this extra wire that was then soldered to the pots. The picture below gives you a better idea of what I'm talking about, since I don't know exactly know what they're called...

Upon closer inspection, I saw that one of the wires from the plastic connectors was very loose, and the more I fiddled with it, it eventually just fell out altogether. There was some kind of small metal thing crimped to the end of the wire, which made the electrical contact with the other side of the connector. Tracing the wire path led me to the ground wire of the bridge pickup - the same one I was having trouble with. Aha! The ground wire's bad connection was the cause of the buzzing when I touched the pickup. I can only assume the factory used those things to wire the guitar to save time in swapping out those cheapo pickups in the event that one failed. So I decided to get rid of those plastic connector things, and just wire up everything the conventional way, which wasn't too much hassle, being that I was expecting to do that anyway. I could even use the same wire that was already there, so no parts or supplies were really needed to do this job, other than the new pickups, of course.

The control cavity. The white plastic connectors in the wiring are not normally used in guitar electronics...

...and here's the reason why - a bad connection.

The pickup replacement was pretty straightforward. Once I got the old pickups out of there, I installed the new pickups into the plastic cream-colored mounting rings using the height adjustment screws and springs. This is usually the tricky part, because it's all too easy to slip and lose hold of a spring as you try to compress it over the screw that mounts into the pickup, and then *BOING*, the spring goes flying and disappears into the Land of Lost Stuff...! I've struggled with non-"behaving" pickup height springs many times in the past. The folks at StewMac have a clever solution for that as well - the Humbucker Helpers. These are stainless steel clips that temporarily hold the whole assembly of the mounting ring, the pickup, 2 screws, and the springs all together until you have the screws securely mounted into the pickup, with springs attached. Then simply pull the clip away, and everything stays put as you need it to. Very cool! The page link shows pictures of them in use - I forgot to take one myself with them on.

Doing things the hard way - removing the old pickups with strings still on.

New Golden Age pickups ready to go. Mounting rings and height adjustment screws installed with the assistance of the "Humbucker Helpers".

Next was to get each assembly into their respective pickup cavities. Not too challenging, except that I went ahead with attempting this installation without removing the strings, as I didn't have a new set of strings to install at the time. It wasn't too difficult - I just had to take extra care not to scratch the guitar's finish while squeezing the pickups underneath the loose strings, and into the cavities. Happy to say that it worked out without incident.

On this guitar, there is a small channel routed into the body of the guitar where you thread the lead wires of the neck pickup (the top one) through, then into the control cavity in the back, where the wires would be soldered to the volume pots. Since the control cavity is fairly tight, I needed to undo the mounting nuts and lift the pots out of the guitar. To give the pots some stability while I'm soldering, I used a small piece of cardboard with holes poked into them, and inserted the shaft of the pots into the holes. That way, I had better access to the connections I needed to get at with my soldering iron. I also used a small cloth to prevent the pots from scratching the back of the guitar body while I'm working.

Removing the volume pots.

Threading the pickup leads thru the channel, to the control cavity.

Soldering the leads to the volume pots, with cardboard as support.

With everything soldered, I installed each pot back where they belonged, and used some masking tape to gather up the longer lengths of wire and make it somewhat neater inside the cavity. The tape replaced the plastic ties they had on the wires before I started. Fortunately I didn't have to make any solder connections to the pickup selector switch, so at that point the job was done, save for screwing the cover back onto the control cavity. Upon first testing, I did have a weird situation where the sound of one of the pickups was cutting out intermittently. After opening everything up again, I inspected the solder joints I just made, which looked fine to me; I didn't see a need to re-do them. I then shrugged, re-installed the pots in the cavity, closed it up, plugged in again, and this time there were no problems with the pickups. Perhaps a wire was shorting out against something inside? I'm still not sure what happened there, but all works fine now; I haven't had any problems with the sound cutting out after re-sitting everything into place.

Pots back in the guitar, with wires taped up neatly.

Everything re-assembled. Success!

I definitely hear a much improved sound on this guitar with the new pickups. They have a smooth, clean sound. I can also coax out warmer, jazzy/bluesy tones as well, especially if I roll down the tone knob a bit. All my testing is done through a small Fender solid-state "Bronco" practice amp, on mostly clean settings - the "distorted" sounds for this little amp are fairly useless (meaning bad). I still need to check it out playing through my somewhat larger Fender "Blues Jr." amp, trying some dirtier, more "authentic" tube tones. That said, I'm happy with how it sounds now, finally.

All the problems with buzzing and noise are gone. This is one quiet guitar - hands down the quietest one I own now, even with all the sheilding work I've done on my Fenders. After all the "wrestling" I've done over the years with the buzzing and humming of my single-coil guitars, this is like a breath of fresh air! I'm looking forward to recording with this guitar in the future.

As I mentioned in the last post, since I'm quite satisfied with these Golden Age pickups, I plan on also getting a single-coil set to install in my Fender Strat. When that happens, I'll definitely write up a post about installing those pickups as well.  Until next time...