Pickups with three wires - only two needed

[Tremster]

Hello.
I have a used no-name set of bridge/middle/neck pickups here that I want to put in a guitar. Each pickup has three wires, red, white and black. Black is ground, white is probably hot, and red is a tap, I suppose.

What do I do with the red one if I don't need it? Just cut it short, put in in tape or heat shrink and forget about it?

Thank you!

[jimilee]

Fwiw, The instructions with 2 sets of dimarzios I have say to use the red and black and tape off the white.

[Leevibe]

I think if you measured for resistance between different pairs of wires, you would find one pair with double the resistance of the others. That should be the full winding of the pickup. I could totally be wrong, but that's what I would do and then tape off whichever wire is left over.

[stecykmi]

you can also set a multimeter to measure the voltage across the wires to figure out the polarity. you just need to touch something metal, like a screwdriver or something, to the pickup poles (a changing magnetic field induces a voltage across the coils). if memory serves (google this to check before wiring it up), bringing metal object towards the pickups should induce a negative voltage and pulling away should induce a positive voltage.