Tonight I took a hammer to the old pickups. Not much to fail inside those things, man they are solid, no moving parts that I could see.
What happened to me is one of the wires going into the pickup had worked loose over the years (1987 model) and when I started to take the coil apart (hacksaw) one wire more or less just fell out of where it goes into the pickup. The other wire took some force to remove/break it.