We add another 'Real Vintage' to the Oil City Masterwound range.

We get lots of rewinds through our workshop, and this puts us in a great position when we have analysed multiple examples of tasty old pickups ... to create very accurate reproductions. These reproductions often incorporate things we have discovered that you won't find in the vintage guitar books!  One of our pre CBS rewinds is documented on the Fretboard forum here
This new Strat set is the Masterwound Pre-BS-62 and gives that wonderful full, warm vintage tone that is so sought after.

After some flirting with software to bring this blog into my Oil City pickups site, I finally decided to simply make it available as a 'window' on my home page ... saves loading time etc etc.

Here's some eye candy of our latest custom, multi-scale seven string Masterwound Blackbird Pickup to get you salivating.
Ash

What will Santa bring you?

A beautiful Dan MacPheson custom made instrument fitted with Oil City NightFighter pickups .... or a stunning Blackmachine B6 fitted with ASL Blackbird pickups ...

I'm happy to say those pickup sets both come from my design pen ... and my workshop. Nearly three years of building and my pickups are cropping up everywhere.

Long time no post!

First my apologies for taking forever to come up with a new blog post ... but so much has been happening that trying to find time to write any of it down has been problematic!

Oil City is going from strength to strength, with close to 1000 pickups made and sold to date and a constantly full order book. Oil City is selling well at home, throughout Europe ... and even further afield!

At the beginning of this year I was approached by Feline guitars in Croydon with a view to producing pickups both for their beautiful custom instruments, and also for retail, and since then I have been developing a whole new range of pickups that will be distributed by my authorized dealers Feline.
Pretty much all my Oil City Range was, and is based on benchmark designs I know well. Jonathan at Feline brought his encyclopedic knowledge of humbuckers to the party ...and the result was an extensive range spanning pretty much the whole history of rock music ... from classic PAF designs to metal shred beasts!

I researched, and tested materials ... wire grades and coatings, baseplate materials, magnet types and configurations ... becoming a bit of a workshop hermit in the process.Now the first deliveries of these pickups are on the shelves at Feline and things are all very exciting.

My Oil City range will still be the same ... and indeed will expand ... as I now have help in the form of Katie my workshop assistant to share some of the load. We are gearing up for the Christmas rush even now ...

Oh yes and the name on these new pickups? My own: Ash Scott-Lockyer

The Treatment and Oil City

9:39PM FlagThe first public outing of the new humbucker designed with Jonathan from Feline ... look in the single pickup LP The Treatment in full swing:

http://live.mytaratata.com/emission/taratata-n488/video/4794/the-treatment-highway-to-hell-2014-multicam

Renovating a 70s DiMarzio Super Distortion

I have a massively soft spot for the original Dimarzio Super Distortion ... this one came in on the Kawai Rock and Roll Star I bought a few months ago. A rather sad example, this on has been butchered, with an extra cable shoehorned through the baseplate to form a crude coil tap.
Both bobbins were loose and hanging apart as the 'shims' had been removed to allow the bodged cable to curl around the bobbins ... and hence everything sagged!

First job was to stabilise the coils by making a pair of wood (mahogany) shims to brace the unsupported ends of the bobbins.

I decided to junk the rather short remainder of the original twin core and shield hookup cable. Installing instead a length of my Oil City four conductor cable to enable series/parallel and coil tap switching.

Here we have the new cable neatly attached ... with shrink tube rather than old tape as before! I used DIMarzio's wiring code rather than my own out of respect for 'uncle Larry'.

And a wrap of tape ... and it's done.

Winterizers

Just got some nice comments about my Firebird Winterizers ... so in a burst trumpet self blowing here they are (grin).

I recently bought my Tokai Firebird new and although the finish and playability are superb, the original pickups were muddy and lacked the definition one would expect from a mini-humbucker. Ash was personally very helpful with my inquiry about the Oil City 'Winterizers', took the time to explain how Firebird pickups were supposed to be made and how Oil City could hand build these for me. The pickups arrived ahead of time and really look the part with their nickel finish and braided leads. Having now  tried the pickups through my Marshall valve amp, these pickups deliver. Clean tones are rich with good harmonic overtones. With gain applied they remain dynamic, each string still maintaining its definition. I cant wait to get out and gig my new 'Oil City Winterizer equipped Firebird. Thank you Ash.

Regards

John