National Grand Console D8 - Pickups

Michael Lester · From: Illinois, USA

I bought this a few days ago from a vintage guitar shop.

In excellent shape given that it is, or close to, 70 years old. Case is junk.

Gave it a good once-over. Cleaned, oiled, polished and new strings on both necks.

Played a gig last night and noted that the near neck is quite a bit weaker than the far one. I'm assuming there is some deterioration of the pickup itself due to age.

Rewind or new? Who re-habs these? Or manufactures new?

Other than the noticeable difference in the pickups, it's fun to play and got a very pleasant tone running through a Spark Live amp with a Ron Hogan patch.

Thanks for your help.

Noah Miller · From: Rocky Hill, CT

Pickups don't really deteriorate by themselves. Really old designs like Rickenbacker horseshoes sometimes use magnets that slowly lose their charge, but a post-War National would have Alnico that's quite stable unless, say, you stick it up against a speaker magnet. The only other possibility is that the pickup has developed a short or an open coil - in either case, this is due to mistreatment and not just the ravages of time.

While one pickup could have been wound colder than the other, the most likely scenario is that there's an electrical problem somewhere else in the steel. Probably at the switch.

If you do decide to get it rewound, I'd go with Tom Brantley. He specializes in oddball pickups. But I'd check the rest of the wiring first.

Nick Fryer · From: Ohio, USA

With all due respect to Noah Miller, I feel compelled to clear up a few things. I’ve repaired many of the National pickups and they are very fragile and prone to problems. A couple things first:

1 - all pickups can absolutely deteriorate over time, even under the best conditions and not just because of misuse. The bobbins on these Nationals are made of paper.

2 - all magnets loose gauss over time. The old Ric magnets are the good batch, the new batch that Ric used after somewhere in early 50s is the less desirable alloy that won’t hold a charge. The 30-40s is the primo batch.

3 - a short or an open coil would render the pickup dead. There can still be sound on some open coils but it would be shrill with little bass.

Things to check:

1 - if you have a multimeter, this is the first thing to try. Test each pickup. See what reading you get. You should see about 4-8k.

2 - checking the electric circuit is great advice. If you solder you can reheat all the connections, clean the pots.

3 - these pickups are very sensitive to the pole piece height. Try and adjust the poles up, but be careful because they are fragile and have very often seized up. If they don’t rotate easy, don’t force them or they break.

4 - best case scenario, you adjust the height and clean up the electrical and they come back to life, from there hopefully it may just need the coils and magnets seen too, if that doesn’t fix it, often the lead wires come disconnected on these fragile coils and can be reconnected with a little luck, if not any of those options, there may need to be some rewinding done.

Tom Brantley is absolutely the guy for the job and does amazing work. I’m too busy with a ton of other pickup work at the moment or I’d volunteer to take on the job. Keep us posted on what you find and hope you get it going without too much trouble. These are tedious and fickle but once you get it going (which you will) they are really great.

Best,
NF
_________________
www.fryerguitarpickups.com

Michael Lester · From: Illinois, USA

Thank you both for your responses.

My reading on the internet suggests that there is a possibility that a pickup can change due to age deterioration.

I will put a meter on the guitar and see how things read. Wish I had done so when I was looking over my tech guy's shoulder when he opened up the control panel to install a 1/4" jack to replace the original phone plug.

Time didn't permit much testing when the work was being done other than plugging in to a shop amp and twisting the volume knob, flipping the neck switch and the tone knob. In that environment, everything seemed working.

It wasn't until I used this guitar at a band gig last Wednesday night that I noted how much volume adjustment I had to make when switching necks. One was much softer than the other - although loud enough to work.

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