Pickups (STOCK)

"LARGE CHROME PICKUPS" (aka. Anti-foils, Hershey Bars, Teisco Pickups....and various other names).

The original Harmony H-801, H-802, and H-805 Bass utilized special chrome covered pickups that derived their design from the Harmony variation of Goldfoil pickup. These pickups are the defining thing about the pre-1988 Harmony H-80n designs. Anything pre banana-headstock era H-803 will have these pickups in them as original equiptment.

SPECIFICATIONS

MAGNET: 2X Ceramic

WINDS: 5400

WIRE: AWG 44

CONSTRUCTION

These pickups utilize the chromed cover as a main frame. They are attached to the bobbin via a retainer bar held in by the six polepieces - all of which are short, using a Cheese-Head (earlier) or a Round-Head domed flat-head screw top. The bobbin is nylon, and wound with around 5400 turns of AWG 42 wire to a capacitance ranging from 4.3K Ohms, to the highest I've seen was 6.18K on the one in my custom parts mutt H-802/804.

The bobbin has 2 ceramic magnets taped to the sides, and then all this is held in by the six screws by a alloy metal retainer piece cut to allow the wires and other screws to go through. These pickups are NOT potted. The pickups attach to the scratchplate via a baseplate that screws to the bottom of the pickup using the tiny screws on each side, and then they attach to the pickguard much like a regular Stratocaster pickup would.

The sound of these pickups is very much it's own. They tend to have a very interesting warm but sparkly character that's slightly muted by such a wide magnetic field (as a result of the fully magnetic metal casing and having 2 magnets on each side of the bobbin rather than one focused one in the middle. That unfocused magnetic field is what makes these sound so garage-like, warm, but thrashy.

"Stratocaster Pickups" (aka. Strat-Style and Kawai style).

From the surface, all of these look like the same kind of pickup you would find on a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Harmony switched to these in 1988, probably because nobody wanted to buy a guitar with 1960's style Teisco-like pickups in 1987. So they put 2 strat pickups in instead, I surmise because it saves cost (by then they were making the Harmony H-80T Strat copy guitar and a few other models derived off American guitar designs, and it costs less to use pickups you use on everything else on your budget model guitar. And also to reduce the need for a special pickup for the original guitar - simplifying their inventory.

But there are actually 2 variants of these - the Tall "Kawai" type pickups, and then regular "Fender" style pickups that utilize plastic bobbins shaped similar to an actual Stratocaster pickup's flatwork.

The tall style feature a pickup cover about 3/4" tall, and inside is some mess of wax, wire, pole pieces, and a magnet, presumably ceramic, all held in by a big pool of wax. Looking through the wax some of these look like they were literally thrown together at the factory. I call them Kawai type because they feature a construction similar to the Kawai variant seen on 70's telecaster copies from Japan. Which also may be the original origin of the "anti-foils" on this page.

The Stratocaster style feature an ABS plastic molded bobbin - filled with six steel, flush, pole pieces, and then those poles have a ceramic bar magnet glued to the back. The pickups are typically wound around 6.4K ohms resistance with .042 AWG wire. They use standard Fender-style pickup covers like those you can buy at Allparts or wherever, which does allow for some real customization choices cosmetically when you have these pickups - which is a plus side.

The downside is these pickups almost all result in the guitar sounding like a Stratocaster with the neck+middle pickup combination on. I'm thinking this was intentional possibly.