[dpm]

I noticed the camera in a convenient spot as I started work on this and thought, "hey scoob, this might make a groovy picstory". Scoob didn't reply, but regardless, here's Part One.......

A bit of background

Vulcanized fiber is traditionally used for single coil pickup flatwork (the top and bottom of the coil), and generally used for odd custom pickups because the construction method lends itself to small shop fabrication. Traditional humbuckers use injection molded coil forms, something which is very expensive and involved to get set up. Having made a few pickups from vulcanised fiber I've decided to abandon it in favour of genuine wood and carbon fiber. This is the first unit made in with the new ingredients. Laminated carbon fiber holds a few advantages over the other materials I could think of - it's very stiff, thin, and relatively easy to work with. I laminated the carbon myself for this one because I happened to have some. I'll get some better looking prefab stuff for future projects.

Here we go...

This is the old vulcanized fiber, notice how it's not flat? That's one problematic aspect of it, especially with long coils like what I'm winding. It's not very stiff either.


The picstory thing didn't occur to me until after machining the flats. Here's the results in ebony and carbon, along with some custom polepieces.


Assembled. Those white sleeves on the end polepieces are styrene spacers. They bond nicely to the flats and insulate the poles. Most guys tape off the polepieces but that doesn't give any structural support.


The headstock of the winder. Laser cut acrylic with a central notch to mount the bobbin.


Coil mounted to the winder, ready to go....


A few slow winds turning the wheel by hand to get things started, check alignment etc.


A few hundred turns in, checking progress.


Halfway there...


Coil wound.


Closer...


Two coils wound..


Potting the coils in wax...


This is cool. Check out the little plume of air bubbles coming through a pore in the ebony.


Carbon baseplate and finished coils.



Part 2....

Here we have the coil and magnet assembly. I use multiple 1" and 0.5" magnets end to end because of the various lengths of coil I have to make. This one uses steel bar between the magnets and polepieces.


Because I'm not using a conductive base on this I'm using copper tape to earth all of the polepieces. Cable is attached.


The four conductor cable all tucked in. There are wooden shims either side to support the coils. The shim on this side is cut so that it clamps the cable in place when the base is attached.


Everything taped up and ready for final potting. This is the end!

[Michael]

Very cool.

Do you have to do all 5000 by hand?

[FortePenance]

cool beans! is that paraffin wax ye be usin?

I heard Van Halen potted his pickups with wax from Roxy.

[Apophis]

Nice

[dpm]

The winder spins at 2000rpm, which is very fast for a pickup winder. I limit the speed by applying load to the pulley with one hand whilst tensioning and guiding the wire with the other. There's two lateral limits (traverse stops) which aren't visible that stop the wire from travelling outside the bobbin. The process is known as 'handwinding' but in reality it a machine wind with hand coil pattern guidance. What people refer to as 'machinewound' is an entirely automated process.

The wax is a blend of beeswax and paraffin.

[Apophis]

my Roter/Melin pickups are also handwind In this technique pickups have better sounds imo, cause every pickups is wound the same, but always slightly dirrerent

[ohio_eric]

That's pretty cool.

[HighGain510]

Those look really cool Dan! I think they would be interesting with the carbon fiber side up too! You should wind 7-string singlecoil pickups for the guys on the board looking for some....

[technomancer]

Pretty cool

Will the pole pieces be cut down to be the same length as the thickness of the pups or will you drill the body to accomodate the pole pieces?

[JBroll]

Literally hand-winding pickups takes a long fucking time. No fun. Some people will pay good money for it but it takes a good amount to really be worth it.

If you're interested in doing this, the simplest way to go is to grab a cheap electronic motor from some place like Radio Shack and using that as a drive. I'd measure out the right length first, as counting the turns is a little annoying to do electronically if you have no prior experience, and then set the motor to go, 'scattering' the things around just for the whole 'authentic' hand-wound sparkle.

Jeff