Not sure if you saw my wax potting thread on he Duncan forum.
Anyway, I have a pickup that needs to be potted. In my research I’ve learned the main reason that most prefer wax is that once you lacquer a pickup, there is no fixing it if anything should ever go wrong in the future. With wax you can always carefully pick it away if you ever needed to.
I’ll be potting my pickup this weekend. Fingers crossed....I’ll be busting my cherry. Lol
I’m a pickup maker. Back in 2005 I experimented with using lacquer, varnish, or polyurethane for potting. Even did one with super glue!
The problems I found were that the inside wraps were left unpotted. So you still got squealing, and as you said, you need to cut the coil off as you can’t unwind it. Not that I ever unwind coils.
I went back to wax because other methods didn’t stop the microphonic squealing.
I’ve got a Parker P-38. It has my own pickups in it. They are all potted and outside of the guitar won’t squeal if placed by the speaker.
But in some situations that guitar cab make a lot of noise near the amp.
It’s a very light weight and acoustically lively guitar. So I also hear my pick tapping the body.
But the high pitched feedback is usually lose parts near the pickup. Sometimes just tightening the screws that hold the bobbins in place helps.
I had a customer with a single coil size humbucker that would squeal near the amp. It was potted but I ended up firmly wrapping black cloth tape around it to stop any vibrations in the structure of the pickup, and that fixed it. The bobbins where able to vibrate a bit.
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