One of the first things I did to my cheapie Teisco Del Rey was to pot the pickups.

“Potting” works by dipping the pickups in a substance that will harden, the idea being that it makes it harder for the wire coils in the pickup to vibrate freely. In the case of these old Japanese electric guitars, the pickups will just scream with feedback when you get near an amp. There’s a lot of info on the web regarding potting pickups with wax, but here’s an overview of how I did it.

First off, it’s potentially dangerous - wax is, after all, flammable, and supposedly the vapors can ignite. I of course threw caution to the wind (well, some of my caution, I kept just enough to be safe). I heated the wax in a home-made double boiler over the smallest burner of my stove.

Also, you need to take care that the wax stays at about 150 degrees - any cooler and it won’t liquify, and if it’s too hot it can melt plastic parts of the pickup. (And if it’s way too hot, it can burn, or so I’m told).

And finally, melted wax is messy, so you want to keep that in mind - do it when your wife is out, and have paper towels handy (just not too handy, as in near a lit burner, right?)

I made a double boiler by setting an old saucepan inside a larger pan that was half full of water; I made sure there was plenty of room for steam to escape.

Most people recommend a mix of beeswax and candle wax. I didn’t bother for this job and just went with straight wax.

One thing that surprised me was how “watery” the melted wax is - I guess I imagined something kind of gooey and thick, but it’s really about the consistency of thin dish soap.

I had already prepared a stiff piece of wire which would allow me to lower the pickup into the wax, and let the pickup rest at the bottom of the pan without contacting it. This worked fine, and it also gave me something to wrap the pickup leads around.

Throughout the process, from heating the water to melting the wax, to the actual potting, I used a meat thermometer to watch the temperature. I got the water temp stable before I added the top pot and the wax. 

Here’s the whole rig together. The wax took about 15 minutes to melt; I left each pickup in for about 20 minutes to let the wax soak all the way in, tapping the pickup lightly around the pan to release air bubbles.

When they were done, I lifted them onto a paper towel and freed the support wire using a couple pairs of hemostats. From there, I replaced the pickup covers and wiped off any stray wax, let them cool, and re installed them.

So - was it worth it?

I’d say so. First off, I wanted to try the whole potting thing on pickups I wasn’t afraid to destroy. And for the Teisco, it really did reduce the microphonic rattle and squeal (though I’ll miss holding the guitar up to my mouth and making “Darth Vader” voices through my amp). The overall sound seemed the same to me; keep in mind this was already a very “gritty” guitar, and those old pickups have surprisingly high output.

I also own an EP-8T Teisco, which is the Gibson ES-style hollow body. It does a fair amount of squealing itself, but it’s a wonderful guitar with a really cool and unique sound - I’m not touching a thing on that instrument (except maybe some new tuners). It’s really special.

You can hear the pickups here:

So far I have three videos of this Del Rey - two of them after I potted the pickups, and one with a replacement tailpiece and P-90 pickups installed. Visit the Teisco Page for a directory of videos and more info on these cool guitars.