Seymour Duncan Dimebucker

[straylight]

This is one of the more extreme pickups I've encountered.  The man himself decribed it as cutting your face off in the right way It's a plastic bodied and backplated passive that is in some way related to the L500XL design and a bit of a squabble. This particular pickup was fitted (by me, for a bandmate) into an LTD EX-351D and it worked really well at getting a cutting lead tone out over the somewaht fat rhythm guitar sound of a SD Invader.

The backplate is more of a cup that extends up the sides of the bobbins. There's no way a clumsy divebomb is going to cut a coil with a wayward string. It's a nice feature for that kind of player.

Seymour Duncan Dimebucker
Calculated Inductance: 7.85 H
Calculated Capacitance: 130 pF
Loaded Cutoff: 2998 Hz
Loaded Resonant Peak: 1940 Hz -53.4 dB
Raw Loaded Peak: 2272 Hz 13.2 dB
Unloaded Cutoff: 5997 Hz
Unloaded Resonant Peak: 4199 Hz -48 dB
Raw Unloaded Peak: 4636 Hz 24.9 dB
Raw Induction Peak: 568 Hz 4.37 dB

DC Resistance 17.12k (16.5k as advertised

Note the little peak and trough at 10kHz, I think that's down to mismatched coils?

Seymour Duncan Dime GR"
Calculated Inductance: 3.55 H"
Calculated Capacitance: 275 pF"
Loaded Cutoff: 4368 Hz"
Loaded Resonant Peak: 2998 Hz -56.3 dB"
Raw Loaded Peak: 3120 Hz 13.3 dB"
Unloaded Cutoff: 7026 Hz"
Unloaded Resonant Peak: 4823 Hz -49.7 dB"
Raw Unloaded Peak: 4919 Hz 24 dB"
Raw Induction Peak: 844 Hz 2.84 dB"

DC Resistance 8.47k

Seymour Duncan Dime WB
Calculated Inductance: 3.55 H
Calculated Capacitance: 286 pF
Loaded Cutoff: 4728 Hz
Loaded Resonant Peak: 3120 Hz -56 dB
Raw Loaded Peak: 3311 Hz 14.1 dB
Unloaded Cutoff: 5997 Hz
Unloaded Resonant Peak: 3311 Hz -58.3 dB
Raw Unloaded Peak: 4823 Hz 22.6 dB
Raw Induction Peak: 844 Hz 4.31 dB

DC Resistance 8.71

The Black/White north/nearest to neck coil is wound a little hotter than the south coil. I don't know if this is intentional or manufacturing tolerances since the DC resistance is some way off spec.

The size of the resonant peak at 1940Hz is quite large compared to other high output pickups oin the market. It's very present and quite unpleasant clean. Forum chatter is you need to use 500k pots to tame this beast. I might be inclined to use 300k or 250k if I had problems with that mighty resonant peak. It does, however, reproduce a famous sound quite well.

[antigua]

IIRC the second resonance at 10kHz relates to the LC resonance of the individual coils, but I don't remember what the exact cause of it was. The closes I've come to modelling it is by connecting the two coils with a capacitance. 

The slightly higher Q might be due to the blades in place of screws and pole pieces.

[wgen]

I thought that with blades pickup like this one there would be much higher eddy current losses. Instead, it seems that the losses are pretty much similar to screws and slugs of other types of humbuckers. The peak is even little bit more pronounced than standard humbuckers of this type, even, as it has already been noticed.
Wondering if thicker blades would mean higher eddy current losses than this example in the thread

[stratotarts]

I think one has to look at a greater sampling of pickups to answer that - I checked my database and found some surprising variation in the Q among different humbuckers. For example, if you are comparing blades to PAF types, I measured a loaded peak of 1.4dB on the SD Seth Lover. That is a covered pickup, so it would be more without the cover. The SH-1N '59 which is an open model, was 2.4dB. It seems to me that the comparison units that were represented here, have a below average Q. I do wonder if the blades are perhaps nickel instead of steel?

[antigua]

I'm sure the blades must be made of steel in order to fulfill their function, and just knowing that pickup makers are too cheap to use anything more exotic. If eddy currents can be modeled as a transformer with a single-turn shorted secondary, then one factor that is different with the blades would be the coupling coefficient. I don't know why a blade would couple less effectively than slugs, but it looks like the difference is rather small anyway. I don't have an full sizes HB's with blades, so this isn't something I've compared before. I'm not a fan of the higher inductance pickups, so unfortunately that's been a blind spot in my sample set. 

[stratotarts]

There's no doubt that you can get relatively high Q with some really thick steel blades - I measured a loaded peak of 2.0dB on import mini HB's with the cover removed:

Yes, the coupling counts but I think there is something about the geometry that also provides some mediation.

[straylight]

Seymour Duncan expliccitly state the blades on this pickup are made of stainless steel.

I have some cheap clones of both this and something more closely resembling an x2n, but ~10 years old and not in production so no chance of getting your hands on one. Is it worthwhile doing?