# Making Pickups



## THRobinson (Jun 29, 2014)

Been interested in the process a while now... few projects too many on the go though. Saw someone selling (locally) a pickup winder. Kinda got my interest piqued.

Was wondering... anyone here make pickups?

Any good/cheap suppliers for stuff like the wire?

Know of any good sites explaining the process and what affects the sound in what way?

Searched a bit before and found a few OK sites for how-to's but not much detail, like what does thickness of wire affect, or if you wanted more warmth do this, more aggressive do that, etc... always thought with all the resources out there, there'd be a "recipe book" for making clones of pickups, the same as there are sites for making clones of pedals.

Anyways... just kinda info gathering... see if it's something worth investing in or not.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I've been making my own for decades. I eschew the fancy machinery and use a simple hand-cranked drill. If I was trying to operate as a business, or attempting to replicate "classic" tones, I probably would use a different method. But even at a half-hour per pickup, it takes me less time to wind a Strat-type coil than it would take to get in the car and drive to the nearest music store to buy one and come home. So, hand-winding is too slow to be profitable, but not so slow as to pose a practical obstacle.

I clamp the hand drill to the bench-top, with the chuck pointing away from the bench, with enough space for me to turn the drill handle. I run a slender bolt through the flatwork of the coil into the chuck of the drill. My current drill gets about 4 turns of the coil for each crank of the handle. When I get going, I can get about 70-80 cranks per minute, which is in the vicinity of 300 turns per minute, or 10 minutes to wind 3000 turns. I should probably build some sort of automated counter, so I don't have to stop and write down how many turns I've added, but frankly I need a brief rest after a bit. So it takes about a half hour to wind a STrat pickup, barring any interruptions.

I bought my wire from a scrap dealer who had several barrels of magnet wire of many different gauges. These were spools of several pounds, sold for $2/lb, of anywhere from #36 to #43. Because spool sizes vary, and are large, making a wire-feeding mechanism 2was a non-starter. So, I place the spool on the floor, vertically, on top of a black background, and the wire is fed upwards, where I tension it with my left thumb and index finger. The black background helps to make the wire easily visible as I look down at the whirring coil (and 300RPM is a blur).

I would not put what I wind for myself up against professionally-made products, but sometimes I get lucky. The nice thing is that I can experiment, and if something doesn't come out right, I just toss it and start over. And in the same way that a person can buy a commercial pedal and mod it, I can also get a pickup that sounds okay and throw a few hundred additional turns on to "heat it up".

If you want to know more, you should probably hang around the Pickup Makers forum at MEF - Pickup Makers . Lots of very knowledgable people post there, in some instances with tips for supplies, as well as insider information about different pickup designs, and plenty of helpful advice. Worth lurking there.


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## knight_yyz (Mar 14, 2015)

Wire thickness and number of winds is the main thing for tone. wire has a DC resistance per foot. Thicker the wire the higher the resistance. So if you use 42 gauge wire at 5000 winds and 44 Gauge wire at 5000 winds, the pickups will have different resistance even though they both have 5000 winds. The thicker wire will sound more "muddy" than the thinner wire. Especially when you get into higher resistance. Cheap high gain chinese pickups will use a heavy gauge wire. 
The second factor is the magnet. Alnico 2/3/4/5//8 etc or ceramic will change how the pickup sounds. I swapped ceramic magnets in my Greco Screamin pickups to Alnico 2 and now It sounds like I have something closer to vintage PAF's. 

After watching the second video you will see why Alnico 5 is the most popular with Alnico 2 being high on the list as well


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## Bizzar_Guitars (Feb 11, 2008)

I have made all the pickups for all of my guitars and basses. 
I don't just wind them, I make the bobbins too. 
And now, I'm experimenting with making the baseplates too.

I agree with mhammer about the Pickup Makers forum at MEF. 
There is plenty of great information there, I spent many many hours reading through the forums to learn 'stuff'. 
You'll find a lot of the boutique winders there like to keep their 'trade secrets' to themselves. 
Turns per layer seems to be one of their closely guarded secrets. 

And mhammer, did you get your wire at Cohen's on Merivale, in between my visits?
I was broke, could only afford one spool of 42 AWG, by the next day when I went back, 'someone' had bought all of the spools of 'pickup-winding' sized wire I had been eyeing. 

I made my winder on the cheap, out of a old re-claimed 70s sewing machine with a working foot switch and a crude 2 x 4 base. 
The bobbin is attached to the hand wheel with 2-way tape. 

I too, place the spool on the ground, letting the wire unravel smoothly off of the end of the spool.
Then, the wire through a clothes pin with toilet paper between the jaws. 
This not only cleans any foreign particles off of the wire, it also provides a bit of tension.
The wire then goes through a curved piece of plastic hose attached to the 2 x 4 base with a fence clip, then to the auto-traverse arm. 
The curve in the hose adds tension due to the friction of being pulled through a curve.
It keeps the wire taut, and, due to the fact that my shop is a mess, it also avoids any possibility of the coil wire snagging on anything between the spool and the coil.

I used one of the machine's internal stitch-pattern gears as the driver for the auto traverse system. (See video)
The auto traverse arm is a piece of wire coat hanger, I strategically bent to try to convert the circular motion of the stitch gear to a linear back and forth motion.
I get roughly 60 turns per layer, give or take a few. 
According to post on the Pickup Makers forum at MEF, the 'Holy Grail', a 1950s Gibson P.A.F., were wound at approximately 65 turns per layer, so I'm pretty close to that number.
After the auto-traverse, the wire passes through the limiter.
The limiter, a de-burred, polished and coiled piece of that same wire coat hanger. 
The limiter will only allow the wire to traverse a maximum of 10 mm. 
I make my bobbins 11mm tall, so that when the auto traverse pauses to change direction at either end, there is an extra 0.5 mm of windable area at either end for the extra 'direction change' wire so that I don't end up with U shaped ends on the coils.
I use a software-based pickup calculator & counter on my old workshop XP mp3 player, that allows me to enter all to the specs of my bobbins, Core height, Core width, Core depth, Bobbin length, Wire diameter, and it will estimate how many turns can fit on the bobbin. 
Or you can punch in a desired resistance, and it will estimate how many turns are needed to achieve that result.
You can change the sizes and see how it affect to results with out having to actually wind the coil first.

The software also includes the counter I use. You can set a pre-determined number of turns, and the software will give a beeping and flashing warning when you reach your goal.
I used a reed switch, in conjunction with a rare earth magnet, attached to the auto-traverse gear, to count the number of winds on the coil. 
The reed switch is wired to the printer serial port of the computer.
I am able to run this machine hands-free and at full throttle when winding. (See video)
On average, it takes me less than 5 minutes to wind an 11mm tall humbucker coil on this machine.

Here's a video of my winder 'in action'


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Bizzar_Guitars said:


> I have made all the pickups for all of my guitars and basses.
> I don't just wind them, I make the bobbins too.
> And now, I'm experimenting with making the baseplates too.


Now THAT is impressive. For beginners, though, I think it is best to start with rewinding dysfunctional pickups, of which there are many....especially given how many players like to remove the protective covers.


> I agree with mhammer about the Pickup Makers forum at MEF.
> There is plenty of great information there, I spent many many hours reading through the forums to learn 'stuff'.
> You'll find a lot of the boutique winders there like to keep their 'trade secrets' to themselves.
> Turns per layer seems to be one of their closely guarded secrets.


True, but when Jason Lollar gives advice, you listen closely.


> And mhammer, did you get your wire at Cohen's on Merivale, in between my visits?
> I was broke, could only afford one spool of 42 AWG, by the next day when I went back, 'someone' had bought all of the spools of 'pickup-winding' sized wire I had been eyeing.


HAH! *GUILTY!! *I dove into that big cardboard bin like I was diving for pearls. I ended up scoring more wire than I'll ever need, so pop me a PM if you ever need any.



> I made my winder on the cheap, out of a old re-claimed 70s sewing machine with a working foot switch and a crude 2 x 4 base.
> The bobbin is attached to the hand wheel with 2-way tape.
> 
> I too, place the spool on the ground, letting the wire unravel smoothly off of the end of the spool.
> ...


That's a clever system. It earns two tips-of-the-hat. I have avoided anything more mechanized because, as noted, the spools are of different sizes. And in some case, the ends of the spools are damaged, so I need a winding approach that allows me to instantaneously sense any possibility of wire tearing and immediately stop winding (i.e., pulling on the wire spool). Of course, the thicker the wire, the lesser the risk of tearing. I've had sonic success with #41, and have tried winding low-impedance pickups with wire in the mid-to-high 30s. Given that I'll only make 2-3 pickups in any calendar year, the effort to make a foolproof mechanized system that can adapt to all the circumstances just doesn't seem warranted. If the wire source and spool quality were more consistent, and I only used #42, I might consider otherwise. Still, I should probably come up with something to limit wire-travel. It is terribly frustrating to have a coil nearly done, only to find amidst the blurring whirling "propeller" that is the coil, that several turns have gone over the edge of the flatwork. Sometimes I can simply unwind turns until I get to the errant turns, and continue winding carefully from that point. And other times, those bad turns are hard to locate, because they occurred so many hundreds of turns earlier without being detected, and the only solution is to pack them in against the side of the coil, and hope that potting works its magic.

My lone contribution to pickup making, that received a warm welcome on the Pickup Makers Forum, is to use teflon plumbers' tape after the coil is wound. Not only is it cheap, and just the right size, but one can use it to pack in the outside windings a little more snugly. And since it can grip without any adhesive, it provides a nice "buffer" between the coil and whatever more decorative and traditional tape one places on the outside. Then, if you need to get into the pickup at some future point, you can peel off the adhesive-based tape without risking damage to the coil.

One of the trickier aspects is magnetizing polepieces. I recently rewound a 1948 DeArmond pickup like this one for Darwin Demers, and the magnets in that thing were nigh impossible to charge with neodymium discs. Inside there are 2 alnico bars - one for low E through G, and a second for high E, with a brass spacer between. I gather the discrepant sensitivity towards the B and adjacent strings has historically been an issue, looking at the later-issued soundhole pickup from them. Unfortunately, the coil was wound around the three-piece assembly, and I only discovered the difficulty of charging the whole thing after putting it all together. If I had it to do all over, I would have charged the individual pieces first. Still, charging bar magnets isn't nearly as easy as charging Fender-style polepieces.
















Mark


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## greco (Jul 15, 2007)

@Bizzar_Guitars Many thanks for the detailed post and the video. VERY IMPRESSIVE!
I enjoy these threads on pickup winding as I find them fascinating and very educational. Many years ago, I had the good fortune of seeing Jon Moore's 'winding workspace'/workshop at his home in Hamilton. My good friend @Hamstrung was having some custom winds done by Jon.

The video was very enjoyable as I admire mechanical creativity...especially when it functions so well. My hart is off to you!
Did it take ages to get all of the precision tensioning and wire "feed" sorted out? 

Through time, @mhammer has had several posts in this forum about winding and I read those with much (academic) interest.

I hope this discussion doesn't "wind down" in a hurry (get it?..groan...sorry) ...and/or that new threads about winding become more frequent here.

Great thread!


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## oldjoat (Apr 4, 2019)

quick cheap counter 
open up a dollar store calculator 
find the 2 pins for the = key and connect small wires to them.

press 1 then + then =
if you keep pressing the = key you add 1 to the counter ....
so all you need is a flexible piece of metal on one end of the bobbin and a fixed metal strip that it touches on each rev.

on/ off clears the counter


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## Bizzar_Guitars (Feb 11, 2008)

@mhammer:
Thanks!  
I concur with your Jason Lollar comment, considering who he is, when he provides information, you take note.
I was suprised when he joined the forum several years ago.

When I saw that cardboard bin at Cohen's I thought I had hit the motherlode! 
I may just take you up on your offer, sometime in the future. Thanks

I also use Teflon tape to wrap the freshly wound coils, and for the same reasons, ease of 
access if any repairs are ever necessary. 

I like to think 'outside the box'. 
After hand guiding, and many rewinding screwed up humbuckers worth of coils, I decided that I needed to devise a way to automate the traverse process. 
Too many times I experienced the same as you, the coil is finished winding, and you discover that several winds of wire had jumped over the edge of the bobbin and were hanging loose. 

I make bobbin tops that match the neck through laminates as opposed to the plastic ones you buy at Stew Mac or wherever, so I can't just throw the screwed up coil away, it needs to go into THAT guitar. So when I wind, I need consistency.

I made a 'flange' out of painter's tape on the bobbin ends, that can catch some of those 'stray winds' from jumping the bobbin, and direct them coil-ward. Once the coil is wound, you just remove the tape.

@greco: 
Thanks!  
And you're welcome.
More details to follow.
There were many incarnations of my traverse set up before I was happy with it.
I hope someone is able to make use of some my trial and error.


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