Under the hood: Maxon 1974 U-1000 Pickup

This 46 year old Maxon U-1000 showed up on Yahoo Auctions needing a new home and a new pickup lead wire. I though the U-1000s started in 1975 but the stamp on this one shows a 1974 date.





Thankfully the pickup coils were both intact and there were no shorts. There are the remains of a "Maxon" sticker that would have looked like this:

You can see that Maxon did a decent job of replicating the good old PAF design with the wooden spacer and the metal bar. The magnet is probably Alnico 8 if it is in line with the typical U-1000 design.

A little bit of soldering action later we have a nice vintage U-1000 reading a bit over 8k in resistance.

Now to find a guitar to put it in....

Get your Ace Frehley on! Greco EG-600PR

Ace Frehley and Kiss have been big in Japan since the 70s and still make waves today. The current Ace-less KISS incarnation just finished played the Japan shows on their latest farewell tour.

Back in the 70's when Gibson's glory days were behind it and Japanese guitar makers were building on years of experience to produce excellent handmade Gibson models even Ace had to see what all the fuss was about. There are photos of him playing the Mick Ralphs model and a special AK-1400 flying V model during live shows in Japan.

Ace with Greco AK-1400 Flying V model -  Key Music Limited

Ace with a 1977 Greco MR-1000

There have been many Greco homages to Ace's famous three-pickup "Budokan" 1974 Gibson Custom over the years starting in the mid 70's with a few Greco models. I just acquired the very clean 1981 EG600PR below from everyone's favorite music store Ishibashi. It is a fairly light one at 4.2 kg and has a nicely matched 3-piece top. The U-1000 pickups are ceramic and work very nicely as open pickups. While the 1980 Super Real catalog has this model listed as having an ebony fretboard ("エボニー") it does not, and I've never seen one that does from the Super Real era and I'm pretty sure that was an unfortunate error in producing the catalog. I'd love to get am EG800PR which has an ebony fretboard and MOP inlays but they are fairly rare. 

Greco PU-2s and the letter "A"

These "A" stamped pickups show up from time to time, with no real reason or rhyme. Why did they use an "A" stamp on some 80's Maxon pickups made for Greco?

The only working idea I have is that they wound the "A" pickups in the same place and at the same time as they wound the "Z" pickups. I think they probably didn't want to get them mixed up so decided to use an "A" stamp for PU-2 pickups.

Are all "A" stamped pickups PU-2s? There are also some "A" pickups without "PU-2" embossing in the plates. One more mystery.

The pictured set is from a 1980 EGF-850. The numbers suggest different production dates. Only one has an "A".