Need help with my Tokai pick-ups

[Hare]

Hi, first post here...

I just bought two humbuckers which came from a Tokai Les Paul. I have a problem determing which one is the neck and which one is the bridge pickup. Could someone take a look at the two pictures and help me out so I can go ahead and replace my old pickups. These should be "Tokai vintage MK2" pickups (GOTOH). Can someone verify this?

The other pu in the picture is a bit dirty but I cleaned it up after taking the picture. Don't ask, I don't know how the previous owner managed to scratch the gold-surface away... :-?

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[Skybone]

You should see that there is "Gotoh, made in Japan" (or similar) stamped onto the baseplate of the pickups, as for ascertaining which model, I don't know, I just have a set of MkII's sat around, and that's all they say.

Which one's which is a reasonably easy task. If you measure the distance of the outside screw poles from the edge of the cover, the one with the screws that are nearer the outside edge of the pickup is the bridge, the one with the screws that are further away is the neck. You should be able to tell this by putting them together, with the screw poles in the middle and looking.

Hope it helps. BTW, both pickups are around 8k-8.5k ohms output.

 

[Hare]

You should see that there is "Gotoh, made in Japan" (or similar) stamped onto the baseplate of the pickups, as for ascertaining which model, I don't know, I just have a set of MkII's sat around, and that's all they say.

Which one's which is a reasonably easy task. If you measure the distance of the outside screw poles from the edge of the cover, the one with the screws that are nearer the outside edge of the pickup is the bridge, the one with the screws that are further away is the neck. You should be able to tell this by putting them together, with the screw poles in the middle and looking.

Hope it helps. BTW, both pickups are around 8k-8.5k ohms output.

Thanks. I thought that the pickups were topwise identical but putting the side by side helped me to distinguish the difference. The other one had the screws a bit closer to the edge, perhaps a millimeter, just like you said. Live and learn.

There's "GOTOH - japan" stamped at the bottom so I'm pretty sure these are the pickups that the seller claimed them to be. I quess there is no way to really distinguish these from the cheaper MK3's but I'm not going to worry about that anymore. Now I'm going to plug in my soldering iron and change my crappy epiphone pickups to these and see if I can notice the difference (I'm switching these to my cheap Epiphone Special II Les Paul).

Thanks for the help !

 

[hans-j?rgen]

My 1984 Tokai '57 PAFs both have the same spacing for the pole pieces, and I'm not sure that Tokai/Gotoh has built them differently. Anyhow, the neck pickup usually has the longer wires, and if you measure their resistance and they don't show similar values, the one with less ohms should be the neck pickup.

 

[TokaiLover]

well im just stating the obvious here but im guessing that the one that is the most tarnished would infact be the bridge pup and the other in the neck....

i say this because every les paul i have had with this style of pups,, my bridge one has always ended up tarnished like this one pictured due to palm muting and my neck one has always stayed nice and shiny..

 

[Hare]

The previous owner just confirmed that the worn pickup was the bridge pickup. Thanks for you help, I have already played a few riffs with the new pickup and it seems 'okay'. Althought the previous one (original epiphone) sounded a bit more bassy. I need to tweak my tonelab a bit more to get the sound that I'm used to but otherwise the pickups seem fairly good. Thanks.

 

[luis]

You can know if a pickup is a bridge one or a neck one by the lenght of the lead(bridge one is shorter) and measuring with a ohmeter(the highst resistance is bridge one to compensate the backward position on the body)