Duncan Designed Jazzmaster pickup remove winding to lower ohm

[derekirving]

I have a Squire Vintage Modified Jazzmaster with the stock Duncan Desinged pickups. I'm looking at replacing them because the bridge is a bit to HOT for me. In the mean time has anyone removed coils from a duncan desinged bridge pickup to lower the ohm? I don't know how much wax, etc is in there, etc. I've done this before with a non potted P90 but I'm not sure on these DD pickups.

[Embenny]

Those pickups are wound with thinner wire than vintage style pickups, in order to accommodate more turns on the same sized bobbin. If you partially unwind it, you will indeed reduce the resistance and inductance of the pickup, but not in a way that will sound like a vintage/"regular" style JM pickup.

One option you could explore other than replacement or rewinding is Bill Lawrence's Q-filter. It can be wired to a switch or pot and its effect is to reduce the inductance of the pickup, which sounds equivalent to removing windings. It's passive and is a pretty neat little device.

[Fenderbassman...man]

I replaced mine with pickup wizard jazzmaster pickups. Those are very highly rated i havent played kine yet they just got installed

[Sweetfinger]

I actually have a bit of experience unwinding and repairing Fender coils and others. I tried the very thing you want to do and found that the windings on my DD JM bridge pickup were so haphazardly cris-crossed that I couldn't cleanly unwind it. I would have ended up destroying the coil. I don't know how they managed to do what they did but it was really a mess. I just carefully resoldered the lead to the eyelet and compromised by putting another neck pickup in the bridge position. They're out of phase but that's a sound I actually use for some things and would have done anyway. The neck pickup is a bit cool for my taste but much better than the stock bridge. Eh, I cut a whole record with it, so it wasn't that bad.
I bought a couple pickups to try in it, like a Fender Vintage reissue and I think, a Seymour Duncan Hot Neck, which was sorta the range I was looking at but haven't got around to installing them because that guitar has been out of gigging rotation for a while because the band I used it in broke up.