Good news for pickup builders

[Mark Hammer]

It would seem the DIY community has provided enough incentive for Stewart-MacDonald to start carrying pickup-making supplies.  http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_pickups/Pickups:_Parts.html

Although you'll have to buy a pair of "zebra" sets of blank bobbins to do so, you'll even be able to make your own double-creme humbuckers without having to worry about DiMarzio sicking their lawyers on you. :wink:

A complete set of parts for making a PAF style humbucker (minus the wire itself) will set you back $27.00+shipping.  A Strat-type SC kit (with Alnico V polepieces) will set you back about $19+shipping.  The bar magnet comes precharged but the polepieces come uncharged.  Stew-Mac is also carrying 1/2lb spools of #42 wire now as well.

Whether these prices (cheaper, obviously with volume purchases) justify taking the leap to DIY pickups for you or not is a choice only you can make.  If you plan to do any substantial amount of PU experimentation, it may well be cheaper to stick a sign up in your local music store saying "Will buy busted pickups" and rewinding those, rather than buying all the parts from Stew-Mac.  On the other hand, it's nice to know there is somewhere you can buy parts.  F'rinstance, I know I have a Strat style PU at home with a fractured bottom plate that can only be attached to the mounting screw on one end.  Nice to know I can send for a set of flatwork for $2.40.

[petemoore]

My obvious ? is do they sound great? Do they compare with what can be purchased readymade?
 Everything else being equal, if you''re using the 'right' stuff [wire, core etc.] and get your windings 'straight' they should sound as good as anything you can buy 'premade.
 DIY and price wise, this looks like a very good to excellent option for pickup 'getting'.
 I have some 'ol HB's [unknown origin...probly cheepo's]...it's likely I'll opt for rewinding them...I don't know what the cores are made of, or how important that is for pickup sound quality.

[Mark Hammer]

Homemade is pretty much all I've been using since around 1982 (with the exception of some Mighty Mite P-90s I got cheap last year).  It takes a little while to master the winding, and especially keeping microphonics to a minimum, but homebrew pickups can sound and play every bit as good, relative to commmercial ones, as homemade FX sound and play compared to commercial ones.  The pickup makers forum over at Ampage is far and away the best source of info on the topic.  A number of folks with going commercial ventures routinely drop by there and are every bit as generous with their knowledge as folks like Zachary Vex, Ton Barmentloo, Tom Pollock, and Jeorge Tripps are here.

The one restriction is that if you are a prolific coffee drinker and smoker, you may have to cut back.  Wire that thin does not take kindly to jittery hands, and if you find threading a needle difficult, then soldering a piece of #42 wire to a lead is definitely out of your league!

[The Tone God]

:::Dances a HAPPY DANCE!!!::: YEAY!!!! No more running around looking for old pickups or basterizing OEM pickups then stripping them. The only thing that saddens me is thinking about all the hundreds of dollars in pickups I've hack appart now. :-(

As for how DIY pickups sound well how would you compare a DIY pedal to a commercial one ? How "good" they sound depends largely on the builder and their skill.

Andrew

[WGTP]

I've been wondering about how to attach a coil to a fishing real with a 5:1 ratio that's a bunch of winds.  

[nooneknows]

Wire that thin does not take kindly to jittery hands

Uh. Maybe I didn't translate correctly: do you mean you're winding your pickups with your hands? Or are you only talking about soldering the ends?
I think the correct answer is the 2nd one, so, what type oof technic do you use to wind them?
Some years ago I tried with the turntable method but it was a disaster, then I tried with a gizmo made by myself but, bleah, it was a horrible mess....
bye
M.

[Lonestarjohnny]

An old Sowing Machine with Treadle power and electric power like your Great Grandma used back in the 40's works perfect for winding pickup's,
strip the sewing mechanizm out, build some winding attachment's for single coil or humbuckers and attach to the hand wheel on the end of the driven shaft and whala, a pickup winder !, you can even by the Counter and attach with a drive built for keeping track of how many turns of copper your putting on the pickup!
Johnny

[troubledtom]

The pickup makers forum over at Ampage is far and away the best source of info on the topic.  A number of folks with going commercial ventures routinely drop by there and are every bit as generous with their knowledge as folks like Zachary Vex, Ton Barmentloo, Tom Pollock, and Jeorge Tripps are here.

thanx mark :wink:
 hey man, leo fender and i were friends for the last 10-12 yr's of his life. he was so nice :cry: { '..a heavy loss to me and others }
  anyway i came and went [as i pleased]at the GNL factory. dale hyatt , vice pres , had me over to his house a few times.....cool!!
   now to the point,
     i use to spend time as a young man, watching little old laddies winding
pick ups, at the speed of light. it was like a ballet on 20 pots of coffee :shock:  they were the original gals from the early days of leos career.  i was blown away, it's not hard you just got to get the hang of it.
           peace,
               - tom

[Gringo]

It would seem the DIY community has provided enough incentive for Stewart-MacDonald to start carrying pickup-making supplies. http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_pickups/Pickups:_Parts.html

Fantastic news!!

Now i only need a credit card and money :lol: It's good to know i can get those magnets, though.

I've been wondering about how to attach a coil to a fishing real with a 5:1 ratio that's a bunch of winds.

I think those reels woud twist the wire badly, at least if you use them like you normally do

[petemoore]

So..pickup winding lessons begin !!! No better way than with a pickup winding Device!!!
 ...oh yeah the questions...at least the first ones
 How important is the magnet to great pickup tone..
 Examples I have
 Silvertone LArge Single Coil, wood bobbin, used to have an interesting tone, broken, magnet may be weaker than it used to be.
 A set of 'U.O.' Humbuckers [unknown origin] haven't tried them, actually they came from a 'junk' box...
 "Original Les Paul" Epiphone Humbucking Pickups [that don't really sound like original LP HB's].
  Anything here worth messing with ?

[Mark Hammer]

Tom,

The credit is well-deserved.  BTW, isn't there one of the original gals still going strong?  Abigail Ybarra.  (I actually blanked on the first name, but knew it started with an A.  It suddenly came to me when I looked over this note just before sending)

Noone,

Well, both actually, but soldering ends more than winding.  I wind with a hand drill.  There are a few reasons.  First, I don't make enough pickups (they're only for me, remember) to warrant investing time and money in a more sophisticated setup.  Because they're for me rather than for customers, I could care less about consistency.  I'm willing to gratefully accept the consequences of any experiment and see what it has to offer, so precision counting and reproducibility is irrelevant.  Second, the rolls of wire I was able to score have tended to be big suckers with at least a pound or more.  The sort of system that would need to be set up to permit smooth wire flow without breakage would be well beyond what is needed for 1/4lb or 1/2lb spools.  I literally *need* the tactile feedback of hand-winding to know when to slow down and yield to the spool.

It's not for everyone, but here's what I do.  I clamp/mount my hand drill (that's a manual one folks, like we used to use in Grade 7 shop class in the 60's) to the corner of the bench so that I can freely crank the handle with my right hand.  The chuck points towards my belly, and the bobbin is mounted into the chuck like a propeller, with a small bolt passing through the centre of the bobbin into the chuck.  Depending on the coilform, I may have to clamp it in place with a nut on the chuck side of the bolt, but oftenthe bolt has a positive enough traction inside the coilform hole that additional securing isn't needed.  

I put the wire spool on the floor directly underneath the bobbin, placing a dark surface underneath it, like a piece of black felt or "fun-foam".  The reason why I do that is that while the bobbin is spinning, I'm looking down at it and I need the dark background to see where on the bobbin the wire is now, so that I can distribute the wire evenly while pinching it with my left thumb and index finger, and scatterwind.  You'd be surprised how blurry things are at 250rpm.

I suppose every drill is different, but mine gives me 3.25 chuck turns per turn of the crank.  So, if I go "1, 2, 3, 4" with the crank very quickly, I've got 13 turns on the bobbin.  When I get up to speed, and assuming there are no snags on the spool, 60-80 cranks per minute is easily feasible.  Eighty cranks is 260 turns.  I usually do 300-400 cranks at a stint and take a breather.  More for my "pinching fingers" than for my cranking hand.  Four hundred cranks is 1300 turns.  If you do the math you'll see that it doesn't really take much longer than a half hour to 45 minutes to do a typical Strat-type pickup, breaks included.  If you had a lineup of customers, that may be too much time, but if you have a functioning instrument, and a little bit of curiosity about how it might sound different, that's an entirely reasonable investment of time; not punitive or restrictive at all.

The one thing I will caution all of you about is that as you get closer to the end of the wire roll, the diameter of the wire part of the spool gets smaller but the diameter of the ends of the spool bobbin do NOT.  That means that the wire leaves the spool at a steeper angle, with much greater tension, and risks tearing at the edge of the spool ends.  Though it is possible to make a fully functional pickup with lots of solder joints (I made a bitchin one that had about 30+ such joints), the absolute worst part of making a pickup is soldering loose wire ends, so whatever you can do to avoid breakage will make you very, very, happy indeed (and if your hands weren't jittery before, 10 solder joints in an hour will make them more jittery than a Parkinson patient).

There are wires you can get with a coating that easily comes off with easily available solvents, but most commercially available magnet wire these days (including what comes from Stew-Mac) is plastic coated and you will likely have to use abrasives to remove it for tinning.  Personally, I keep some #800 emery paper, pinch the wire end lightly in a folded-over piece of it, and gently rub off the coating.  Tinning it over a dark surface will also make it easier to see what you've done.

Depending on how snug a coil you wind, different degrees and types of potting will be needed.  Remember that it is fluctuations in the magnetic field in and around the coil that produce the voltages which deliver the signal to our FX and amps.  Normally, that fluctuation is produced by a magnetically attractible string vibrating, but quite frankly, the coil doesn't really care if it is something moving around the magnet, the magnet moving itself, or the coil moving (folks familiar with vinyl will remember that phono cartridges could be "moving coil" or "moving magnet").  As long as there is some source of field fluctuation, there will be a signal.  If the coil is loose, louder amp volumes that make the windings "shiver" will produce signals, called microphonics, that result in feedback at ridiculously low volumes, and not good feedback either.  

The solution to this is to fill in the gaps between windings with something that holds the windings still.  Usually this is a melted wax solution into which the finished coil is dipped, soaked, and then wiped off.  I've had luck simply melting wax onto the coil from the outside with a heatgun and letting it soak in.  Pointing a heat gun at a bobbin is obviously going to be a more reasonable thing to do with a Strat-type coil and the relatively unmeltable flatwork that uses, as opposed to a plastic bobbin for a humbucker.  On the other hand, the need for potting increases the more turns there are on the coil and the wider the coil is.  HB pickups split the total number of turns in half such that each bobbin has a pretty tight coil with very little microphonic activity.  Attempts to make flat-wide coils, though, like P-90 or Jazzmaster shaped ones, really need potting of some sort.  Some folks (even Fender) have used varnish as a way of fixing the coil but these can get brittle over time and in any event do not lend themselves to post-fabrication changes to the pickup, like adding more turns or taking some off.  The risks to tearing the coil are just too high.

Finally, there are constantly questions about the tape that the pros use for covering their pickups.  It is a special low tack tape.  You need it for several reasons.  One is that if you need to remove the tape for some reason (e.g., inserting a coil-splitting scheme into a HB pickup), high tack tape will grab and tear the coil.  The other is that all the adhesive goop needed to make for stronger adhesion, breaks down over time and leaves an awful mess.

The solution I've come up with is an intermediate step, involving commonly available teflon tape fromthe plumbing section of your favourite hardware store.  It's very cheap, and conforms very nicely (like a condom, actually) to the coil.  You can pull it tightly to pack in the coil a little more, and once the coil and lead wires are firmly held in place, you can put some adhesive-based tape over that, without risking the adhering goop coming into contact with the coil itself.  Works like a charm.  I'm certain that if teflon tape had been available in 1960, it would have been a part of all the vintage guitars we know and love, and likely would have been standard today.  Low tack plastic tape continues to be there instead for the same reason we still use .02uf tone caps for both front and rear pickups - the dead weight of precedent.  People want what was originally used, whether it was sensible, or drawn from a much more limited range of viable options at that time, or not.

That's not all you need to know about making pickups, but it's a good start.  Start your counters, boys and girls......and wind 'em up!!

[petemoore]

Anyone ever see a source for pickup wire in salvage item like
 Monitor has windings, I have many coils around here...other fairly thin copper wire...and a broken pickup
 Also have...an at least half built LP double cutaway Flat Top clone my own that I'll hopefully be wanting some hot pickups in very soon...

[petemoore]

Is this product represented yet at the Stew Mac online catalogue? I looked around and saw pickups and stuff for pickups but no winding jigs or info related to winding pickups...

[The Tone God]

Is this product represented yet at the Stew Mac online catalogue? I looked around and saw pickups and stuff for pickups but no winding jigs or info related to winding pickups...

Winder:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Special_tools_for:_Electronics/Schatten_Pickup_Winder.html

Info:

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Books,_plans/Electronics:_Pickups/Basic_Pickup_Winding.html

My Site:

Recoil

Andrew

[troubledtom]

Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 2:22 pm    Post subject:    

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tom,

The credit is well-deserved. BTW, isn't there one of the original gals still going strong? Abigail Ybarra. (I actually blanked on the first name, but knew it started with an A. It suddenly came to me when I looked over this note just before sending)


cool mark,
  the gals [ if alive ] may still be at GNL. after leo past away , nothing was
ever the same. oh well , my army of GNL's still kill.
  but, i'd NEVER buy from BBE.
i don't think i'll ever need to get another axe for the rest of my life. notice i said " need "  :twisted:
         peace,
             - tom

[WGTP]

I saw a picture of Seymour Duncan with this lady at the Fender factory talking pickups.  They were doing a comemorative pup for a tele or something.  I guess she has been doing them since back in the '50's.  Probably the Hendrix estate, Clapton, Gilmore, etc. out to send her to Hawaii for a couple of weeks or something.  

[nooneknows]

Many, many thanks for the more-than-complete info about pickup winding, you make me want to start again my experiments about it...
M.