Sustainer question

[Electric_Death]

I was thinking.
Since there seems to be some fuss over the loss of a pickup because in most cases room is limited, why not just turn a humbucker into a single and mod the extra coil into the sustainer coil?
This seems like it would make for a really easy build and eliminate the pickup position loss. I've seen a lot of builds where guys just slap the amplification coil onto a pickup but usually it ends up being rather Frankensteinish and insanely massive.

On a similar note, I did a lot of experimenting with the supposed piezo speaker sustainer.
In some cases, I just got a horrid squeal, in others, I definitely got a bit of a sustain effect but nothing to write home about.
I think that potentially with enough time and effort, it could work but I don't think I'll be that guy.

[space_ryerson]

I've seen that done on some guitars with the Fernandes sustainer, since I hear the sustainer driver used as a pickup sounds kind of 'meh'. Both the Fernandes and the Floyd Rose/Jackson/recent Kramer sustainers (all the same circuit) use a transformer somehow with the sustainer driver to make it useable as a pickup. I have a Floyse Rose sustainer with a dead transformer, and the driver does not work as a pickup as a result. There were no markings on the tiny transformer to denote it's value, so I've been trying to reverse-engineer the circuit in order to replace the transformer; which has been tedious at best.

On Sustainiac's site, they suggest against putting a pickup next to the driver. This is what they say about it: Placing a single-coil pickup next to the driver: This does not work well. The side-by-side permanent magnetic fields of our patented bilateral driver "bend" the field of a single coil pickup. The result is that three of the strings will have about 6dB lower output level than the other three strings. A mini-humbucker pickup doesn't exhibit this problem as much. In our opinion (and that of many customers), the Sustainiac driver sounds better than most mini-humbuckers. It also has the new dual-sound feature.

I've also heard that an ebow can slowly demagnetize a pickup, which is uncorroborated, and possibly not applicable in the case of a sustainer.

If you happen to stumble across the value for the transfomer in the Floyd Rose sustainer in your researching, please let me know!