Official Luthiers Forum!

Hey folks, new to the site, but been building for a fair while. First one was a strat, then a tele, and currently waiting to be wired up are a LP and an Explorer style. I'm in the middle of actually building a semi-hollow body tele, the thinline style. And seeing as this is the first guitar I've started to actually be confident will turn out well. So, being the idjit I am I decided that nothing would do but a set of hand wound pickups.

And here begins the weirdness. I've googled, wandered around forums, emailed a few folks, and still cannot find the info I'm looking for about actually doing the math behind the pickups, actually learning how to do the pickup correctly from the word go.

I understand the basics, the 42-44 gauge wire, 44 for hot, 42 for lower key tones. I get the basics of the winding machine like a lathe with a face plate and double sided tape.

If anyone knows of a book or website or even just a page or pdf linked from a forum site somewhere I would greatly appreciate it. Or if any of you are well versed in pickup winding and are willing to share some of the apparent secrets with me I would be forever in your debt.

Thank you all in advance!
Sam

Hi Sam

I have been down a similar road. Firstly, the subject is more complex than wire thickness choice. Thinner wire allows more turns, but gives higher resistance. Magnets, Alnico 2 gives warmer, Alnico 5 brighter tones. Then matching pots, and tone caps changes things as well. Then neat or scatter wound changes things.
Look here. This is the best I have found.
http://www.moore.org.au/pick001.htm
This gent is very clued up. There are several pages and on a PC it allows PDFs to be created of each article.
I have a gauss level detector, multimeter and LCR meter. I use a low cost hand winder that is geared. I have read the Lollar pickup book, and seen a few electric winders in operation, and most have interesting setup complications.

I appreciate the link, I've been reading on it a bit and e seems to have his stuff together, but the flipside is I don't know whats right and wrong haha. I think I'm going to order a hand winder and a couple coils of different wire from amazon.

Look at Stewmac they have some info. I buy magnets, fibre sheet there for strat pickups. Also bought a few P90 kits for an experiment suggested to me by Malcom Moore. Wire I buy from UK on eBay, 0.5 kg and 1 kg rolls. Amazon unfortunately, as soon as your address changes to Australia, the price jumps 30% or so, and shipping is expensive. If you are in the US, then Amazon is a good place to start.
You should target about 10000 turns. No more than 12000 or less than 6000 when you start.
As long as you record what you did, count turns, know what magnets you used, wire size, turns and resistance measured on a meter, after a few you will start to get an idea of what to change. Less turns of thicker wire gives a smoother flat response, more turns (thinner wire or it won't let you wind enough before the bobbin is overflowing.) sharper response with higher output. More turns raises inductance and resistance.
Seymour Duncan have specs for resistance and inductance for most of their pickups. I use theirs as a guide because I have installed many of theirs, and keep a few spares on hand.
Because I am in electronics, I have the inductance meter. I can also measure the coil Q, or ratio of inductance to resistance.
I hope this helps.

It most certainly does help. My main problem is the closest to electronics I've come before it soldering new pickups and pots in a guitar haha. Trying to get a handle on everything that goes into the pickup world. I greatly appreciate the help you've been offering up.

jason lollar has a book that i've found pretty useful:
http://www.lollarguitars.com/mm5/mercha ... de=25-95-1
buy from his site ($60) because elsewhere i've seen it for $400!

go here as well:
http://music-electronics-forum.com/f11/
some of the icons in the industry hang there but can be well, "feisty" and abusive so bring your armour.

i bought a "handshake electric thread wind machine" from ebay for 60 bux. 100% manual but i'm in no hurry and it'll get it done, but it will need a little bit of tooling to get going. you'll need to cut down the shaft and make a platten to mount your coils onto.

the pickup folk are very closed up and there are few definitive resources out there.

sm for small qty's of wire or if you go big, then check out MWS but they'll want a bulk purchase.
allparts and mojotone for bob's and flatwork, poles, mags, etc..

oh, and get a good digital multimeter. it'll need a 20k ohm setting not all of them have it. an inductance meter would be nice to have as well but not critical when you are starting out.

+1 for the Music Electronics Forum. Tons of great, friendly, very helpful people around there. Best of all, very few treat what's known about pickups and winding methods as a trade secret. The market for custom pickups is well beyond saturated. If you don't mind some heavy math there's a wealth of fascinating information available from the physics department at UIUC (I've posted links to them on these forums in the past.)

The only stuff I'm secretive about with respect to pickups are active electronics and truly new/novel design elements as well as proprietary methods... 99% of the pickup winding community has nothing to do with the more advanced new technologies I'm developing (a guy who claimed to be developing a completely different system based on hexaphonic pickups and digital signal processing ended up showing a watered down version of some of my work at NAMM). Some people get paranoid about the number of turns per layer they use, treat Fender's original winding machine designs as if no one else has ever seen them, and flat out misinform others by claiming that PAFs were hand wound, when in reality they all came off of machines made by a company named Leesona and have nothing to do with "scatter winding." Gibson's original winding machine that made every PAF in history is incidentally now owned and operated by Duncan... Which might explain why my favorite PAF style humbuckers are made by Duncan and I later learned were wound on that same machine (my favorites are the Pearly Gates set as well as antiquities.)

I personally recommend getting started using a tried and true design that is nothing more than a modernized version of Leo Fender's original pickup winding machine. All you need is a sewing machine motor with foot controller, reed switch/optical switch/hall effect sensor, Arduino (with compatible display), dimensioned wood (nothing fancy just pine, fir, poplar, or whatever is on sale or in the scrap bin), rubber bands, and if you really want to be fancy a metal rod complete with two small sleeves/set screws to act as guides for the wire. You can easily be up and running for under $50.

Feel free to send me a PM if you have any additional questions. I have a library full of links, hundreds of files ranging from documents to spreadsheets for calculations. Whatever you do, don't go wasting your money on a overpriced Schatten winder. $300 for a DC motor in a box in borderline criminal in my view.

I appreciate all the help and thoughts/info you folks ave been offering. I just figured f I can make a set for myself and they turn out well I'll just start winding my own. I have an issue with the thought of paying 300 bucks for a set of "custom" pickups from places like bare knuckle. I like the idea of having custom buckers in my tele build, and maybe a LP I built up.

Why are so many people so uptight and, like you said, flat out liars wen it comes to winding?

I'm really considering buying the handwinder off ebay in the 30-50 dollar range, and I have plenty of pickups laying aruond from various builds, replacements, and just guitars destroyed through shenanagins. I managed to snap the neck off an Epi SG with the heavy gauge ernie balls, not really realizing that a plywood guitar would do that about 10 years ago haha. Great fun for younger me lol.

I have Lollars book… its about as amazing a book as a beginner like me ever needed…
I am in the process of building the winding machine now… and taking my time with it…
luckily someone left their sewing machine here years ago, left the country, and never came back for it… my sweetheart has lost one of her oscillating fans from the greenhouse...
I'll probably finish the machine itself come winter … when Im stuck inside..
Animal Magnetism for Musicians is supposed to have some interesting information…
but Ive never been able to source one…
I second the electronics forum…
Theres a book by Craig Anderton I think… (it looks similar to Electronic Projects for Musicians maybe by the same author)
Anyway - I did see Lollars book on torrent sites a long time ago.. but it disappeared when PB went down…
cheers
charliewired