O.T. vintage Gibson P.A.F.

[Johan]

I realize this is probably old news to many members on this forum, but anyway...
today I got an oppurtunity to have a close look at two vintage Gibson P.A.F.'s and I thought I'd let you know what I noticed...they both still had their nickel covers and looked like they had never been opened.
one of them had an impedance of 7,8 kOhm and the other was 8,1 kOhm, so nothing special there...but here comes the interesting part. at least for me...they both had A LOT more hum than what I normaly hear from humbuckers....this to me indicates that the coils are missmatched, or at least not matched to eachother as closely as they are on a modern humbucker. also the frequensy responce seamed different from modern Gibson humbuckers. I couldnt put my finger on exactly what was different, but it seamed there was more air in the treble and the mids where a little less, well..middy.....allmost a little bit like a single coil...could this also be the result of unmached coils? perhaps some canselation of frequenses?
all of this made me remember an interview with E.V.H from when ErnieBall made his first signature guitar...the people at DiMarzio thought his old P.A.F was broken becouse one of the coils was allmost twice as strong as the other and that was what made it sound like it did...

From what I've read on the internet, its unlikely that the magnets being fifty years old makes much difference, but unmatched, losely wound coils allmost HAS to make a difference...or what do you think?..

..anyway...

Johan

[The Tone God]

Since I'm just sitting down from finishing rewinding a humbucker I can give some thoughts.

The magnet wouldn't have any effect on the hum. Generally

I belive PAF wire is 44 so to have a varience as much of 300 ohms could be the result of one coil having a few more turns then the other coil. This would explain the hum since in theory if each coil has the exact same number of windings is should be hum free. I don't know if the PAFs were handwound but since I handwind my pickups I do I make sure I have the exact same number of winding on each coil, and they are hum free, but I still have some varience in resistence. I think pickup winding back then was not much of an exact science. Could even be possible that the coils are not wired properly. (i.e. in series so the coils are not hum cancelling.)

Loose winding of coils doens't really change the resisence as much as the capcitence of the coil which will affect the tone of the pickup.

Andrew

[Joep]

Hi Andrew,

It would be interesting if you put something on that pickup winding stuff on your site. I'm really interested...

Bye,

Joep

[The Tone God]

It would be interesting if you put something on that pickup winding stuff on your site. I'm really interested...

Hmm...never really thought about post about that. Its not a bad idea. I still have a few more pickups to wind so I could take some shots of the winder and so forth. I don't know if I should make it a full how-to article since I do a few things different from other pickup builders so I'm sure I'll get some "comments" on what you could call my technique.

I'll see what I can do.

Andrew

[WGTP]

According to the forum at Ampage, PAF's use 42 gauge wire, with 5K turns for approx. 4K resistance per coil, with enamal coating.  The "scatter winding/hand winding" deal is that it has less capacitance than a machine wound coil, more air?  Gibson is now selling pickups that are deliberately miswound, for that vintage deal.  Check out the forum, lots of good info.  

[Ammscray]

For the record, old original Gibson PAF's were wound by hand, with 42 gauge plain enamel wire, not 44, which is much too thin... 43 gauge is often used to wind hotter, modern distortion-type p-ups because you can fit more on the bobbins, but of course it is a different sound...

Th hum you heard isn't coming from mismatched coils, I have at least two examples of original PAF's where the coils aren't matched but they're dead quiet...and I don't use the covers either...

The hum comes from shorts in the coild windings...the early wire had much thinner insulation than by todays standards, and would often short out resulting in a dead p-up...Gibson changed to a thicker-insulated wire around 1963...

 The thinner insulated wire had a definite effect (positive IMO) on the sound because of it's effects on the capacitance and inductance of the coil... definitely more open and "airey", as compared to the thicker wire which IMO doesn't have as much character...but can sound good in the hands of the right winder...

Those p-ups could be on the way to shorting out, or they may never...as long as they sound cool it shouldn't matter...

Last but not least there could also be a ground loop problem in your guitar's wiring...which is easy in Gibsons with all that shielded cable going all over the place...

Hum can definitely come from a p-up not being wired properly, but to this day I've never seen an original that was wired wrong...

The guy that owns Jake Jones Classic P-ups, is the only guy I know that uses the correct-period insulated 42 enamel for his PAF clones, and they sound IDENTICAL completely to my originals FWIW...

peace

[The Tone God]

Thanks for the correction fellas. I wasn't sure if it was 42 or 44 wire. I remember somewhere some pickup manufacture was using 44 in a PAF style clone. Anyways I'm not a pickup historian. I'm not interested in building clone pickups. I just build pickups that I like for what I do. I guess thats the same mentality I have with effects and amps.

I will atleast take some pic of my coil winding rig that I built.

Andrew