Quiet Riot - The PAF Humbucker

 

Seth Lover’s humbucking pickup design centred around using a double-coil pickup. One coil utilised fixed steel ‘slug’ polepieces and the other had adjustable threaded steel polepieces. The two coils were placed side by side, and each coil was wound around a butyrate bobbin. The two coils were wound in series but ‘out of phase’ with each other with opposing magnetic polarities. The result, as Seth Lover put it, was ‘a pickup that bucked the hum.’ 

Lover then put a single bar magnet beneath the coils. The threaded poles passed through a steel bar, allowing contact with the magnet, and the fixed poles had direct contact with them. The entire mechanism rested on the magnet and maple spacers and was housed between a steel bottom plate and a thin nickel silver cover that allowed access to the threaded polepieces.