Interesting that the first printing carries a premium over the newer version with updated sources. aside from building your own winder or buying one, or putting value on your labor, what are the parts costs for the pieces and wire to roll your own pickkup? (not that anyone does this to save money, but I am curious comparing parts cost to the cost of replacement pickups)
Pickup winding
- Thread starter FrendanBraser
- Start date
knucklehead
Active member
Most who bought this early on did so to build their winders - they could not be bought back then. I never will understand 'vintage' pricing on anything . . .
As with most things - buying in higher volume brings overall prices down. It's been more than a decade since I tinkered with this so I am a lousy source for current pricing. Oddly, the biggest on-going expense is the flatwork unless you are building a traditional design - forbon isn't expensive, but if you want unique, accurately cut and drilled top and bottom plates and rely on someone else for it that is where you'll spend your money. Traditional pickup parts are easy enough to come by; Strat, Tele, split humbucker, P, J, etc.
In the end if you're successful in generating pickups for a hand full of instruments it is likely a break even proposition - but that depends on your investments. A winder can be built VERY cheaply - that will be the largest single up-front expense.
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JetFixxxer
Well-known member
Here's my winder... it's been modded since this video been uploaded. I also don't wind as much as I did.
Modified a Harbor Freight bench grinder.
Modified a Harbor Freight bench grinder.
Chuck D. Bones
Circuit Wizard
Getting clever can get interesting; my interest was creating balanced magnetic pickups - well-balanced humbuckers, basically - and my first two attempts at it were to simultaneously feed two wires around the same bobbin. It turns out that if you identically wind opposing coils they cancel each other out - I ended up with near-zero output on a 14K pickup. Who knew?
Ok, I knew.
The two windings on a humbucker have to be in opposite polarity magnetic fields to work. That's why each bobbin has its own set of pole pieces. One bobbin has north facing up and the other bobbin has south facing up. With opposite polarity on the magnets and opposite polarity on the windings, the signals from the two bobbins are in-phase when the strings are moving thru the pickup's magnetic field. External magnetic fields, like the 60Hz field coming from an amp's power transformer, produce out-of-phase signals at the two bobbins and those hum signals cancel.
JetFixxxer
Well-known member
knucklehead
Active member
Yes . . . . BUT
If you wind concurrent coils around one another - first one and then the other - it does work, despite being wrapped around the same magnets. Not perfectly, but it works. Having identical coils matched wind for wind does indeed put the signal out of phase - but if the coils were NOT identical it functioned - polarity of the magnets/field didn't matter. Only learned this 'cuz I 'broke' it.
SOOOO much fun.
o.0
FrendanBraser
Member
Think I know what my next project is, just been going in blind charging my own magnets
Untro
Active member
Just ordered his book on his website, thanks for the recommendations y'all. I've got a lot on my plate to clear up but this is a great project to have in the barrel, love that the book covers the winding machine construction. I may just have to order some '70s' lollars for my jbass in the mean time, she needs a breath of fresh air! Love their pickups on my Jazzmaster, Lollar can't do no wrong.