Pickup Winder Help

[malebolgia]

I could really use some help on how to build a pickup winder. i have a bunch of links but i was wondering does anybody have the lollar book? and maybe send it to me? i'll send it back, or maybe some one could copy it and send it to me?

[Jaam]

Unless you want to start earning money winding pickups, you really don't need a motorised winder. You can very easily wind your pickups with a hand-drill or even just by hand(Just takes some time).

[nollock]

check out this pickup builders forum, there a very hepfull bunch

http://www.firebottle.com/fireforum/fireBB...m=pmgd&enter=go

[frank falbo]

I just wound yesterday on a drill. I made the mandrel so everything was free. The results are stellar and there's not much else to it. I did it all by hand. If you're careless, you can go too far to either side. So if you aren't confident about your "touch" then simply mount the drill and then mount two guard rails on either side of the coil width. That way you won't travel too far to the outside. That's literally all there is to it. Dedicated winders with counters and tension gauges are all extra items you don't need for your first...say...100 pickups or so...?

[javacody]

Frank, what did you do for a counter? Without a way to measure inductance or counting the winds, its pretty hard to get winding right, from what I've read.

[GuitarGuy]

Frank, what did you do for a counter? Without a way to measure inductance or counting the winds, its pretty hard to get winding right, from what I've read.

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make one from a calculator or a pedimeter (kellogs acually)

Counter

[javacody]

Awesome link! I have one of those pedometers from the McDonald's adult happy meal. It's already got a reset button. Great idea.

[Stalefish]

I use a calculator for my counter.. Works pretty well.. Just a matter of figuring out what bit of the circuit board does what..

[frank falbo]

No counter necessary for this one. I did two single coils, one with Duncan 1/4 lb poles and the other with 1966 Fender poles. I wanted to try an idea I had, so they both have taps. They're bridge pickups, so I wanted them to tap when combined with the middle single. When I knew I was just about there, I'd take a resisitance reading by removing a little insulation and measuring what I had so far. Then you just put a little lacquer on it again. Really since the other winds are still insulated, you don't technically have to lacquer your raw section. I was lacquer potting these two, so I had it ready. Once you start winding you'll get a feel for what "x" winds/resistance looks like.

But yeah, counters are so easy to implement. With these two, I only needed to check the resistance for the tap. The tap had to be perfect. But the overall wind was just as hot as the coils could take. In other words, after the tap, I just filled the bobbins. So it wouldn't have mattered if I had a counter. Unless it was like a gas gauge: empty-full

I don't think I'll wind with a counter again. Although I'm thinking of doing my own 7-string pickups. If I do, I'll probably want to be more exact with those from one pickup to the other, and I'll use a counter.

[javacody]

Frank, does the "scatterwound" thing that people talk about really make that much of a difference? Have you experimented with tightness/looseness of winds at all?

I want to get started in pickup making, but it seems like there is so much experimentation to be done before you figure it all out. Sounds like it could take a year or more to get pickups that you are really happy with (starting as a beginner)? I'm a tinkerer at heart too. I would experiment with every possible variation, which would take probably at least 5 years of part time winding. I'm not sure I want to start down that road, knowing how obsessed I can get with projects.

[GuitarGuy]

Keep in mind the resistance can change as you wind. If there is too much/too little tension. The wire can be drawn thinner and therefore have a higher resistance. If your are experimenting a counter gives you an accurate gauge wheras resistance is a little more variable.

[javacody]

Well, yeah, that was part of my point. But it sounds like Frank has the experience. For a beginning winder, its probably a lot more important. If you overstretch the wire or don't stretch it enough, you are going to alter the resistance (from what I've read) so you really need to wind to number of turns. Someone who has done a bunch of pickups should have the tension down I would think.

[SwedishLuthier]

Am I the only one that think that Jason Lollars book is overrated? OK he show how to build a automated winder, BUT fail to discuss some important things that is of more interest for beginers. Like bobin design, magnet design (rods vs screws) ets.

Steven Kerstin share more info than the Lollar book (IMO). Check out www.skguitar.com

Edited September 5, 2005 by SwedishLuthier

[Mattia]

javacody, as I understand it, pretty much anything you do short of motorizing your side to side and automating your tensioning is gonna result in a 'scatterwound' pickup. And even then, it'll probably still scatterwind to a degree. Homebuilt machines don't lay the winds down precisely next to each other, sequentially, like a factory machine does.

[Matt]

Someone on here has made a fantastic lego PU winder, I suggest you do a search?

matt

[jay5]

McDonald's adult happy meal

Off topic, but ***?

[frank falbo]

I think the term scatterwinding is quickly becoming a marketing term. For example, as Stew Mac starts selling pickup making supplies, I hear them talking about how scatterwinding generally produces a pickup with more "harmonic content" etc. (they even use the word "better") What they really want is for you to start thinking "hey, I could do this" and "winding by hand is better than a flawless machine wind because it's organic." (you know, machine=cold, human=warm) Then you buy their stuff.

Put all other variables aside, like coil size, magnet, and wire gauge for now, because the thread was on winding. Experimenting with tension, and wind application is far more ambiguous. You'll never be able to duplicate what you just did. Someone needs to create some kind of "learning winder". It should be easy for some super-scientist to create a winder that used lasers to record the physical placement of the wire, tension meters to record the tension, and of course, a counter to record exactly when and where the tension and "scatter" occurred. Then the winder could finally duplicate someone's hand winding over and over.

In my experience, slick, tight winds (not so tight you thin the wire) in perfect succession make for the cleanest, clearest sound. We don't always want that in a guitar pickup. Scatterwound coils (or for our purposes "irregular and amateurish" hand winds) do make a more interesting, rich sound. But what does that mean? Do you want to vary the tension, but still maintain methodical succession, or do you want uniform tension with random placement? The answer is "yes"! All variances have produced great sounding pickups over the years. They're just different. My personal "favorite pickups list" includes pickups with crappy, loose short coils and taught, perfect tall ones, and some in between.

As for thinning the wire, I would have loved to pull this 42 a little thinner on these last two pickups I wound, but the Stew Mac wire was dry and stiff. They're sending me another spool for some other reasons, so we'll see if it's different. There was no elasticity in this spool at all. So going tighter was just pulling the coil into itself harder, not applying wire "tension" where all the wire in the coil has a little bit of "pullback" tension in it. What I wanted, is like if you cut the coil after it was fully wound, the cut would open up a little because the wire would spring back a little. This wire was just pressing hard against itself. After I get this next spool I'll render a verdict on the Stew Mac Schatten wire.

You will get obsessed with it if you start. But as a beginner, don't try to make a pickup sound like something you imagined in your head. Envision the wind first, and then enjoy the sound second, whatever it is. The big companies have the resources to design and implement, but guess what? They do the same darn thing. These "gurus" still make 20 prototypes before settling on a design. So as much as anyone knows about the process, sometimes they still don't know exactly what they'll get in a wind until they plug it in and play their first chord, just like us.

Pickups are cheap, so unless I want to make something that isn't commercially available, it's not worth it to wind. You won't catch me reverse engineering the PAF or Strat single.

[Mattia]

Pickups are cheap, so unless I want to make something that isn't commercially available, it's not worth it to wind. You won't catch me reverse engineering the PAF or Strat single.

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Interesting thoughts, thanks!

About the 'pickups are cheap' bit...not if you buy brand name. Materials for pickups are cheap, though, which is why I'm going to start trying to wind some. I figure if I really don't like the sound, cutting the windings off and re-winding is a matter of an hour's work or so, and a couple of bucks worth of wire.

Besides, when was 'buying is cheaper' ever an argument to dissuade people from building their own here, particularly when it comes to something you don't strictly need a whole lot of time or high tech equipment to do, right?

;-)

[MerlinTheWizard]

Scatter winding, as opposed to a very regular winding, does have other advantages than pure marketing hype.

Strictly parallel wires in a coil tend to behave in specific ways electromagnetically speaking. This can get pretty complicated, but basically the end result is that some frequency bands will get canceled out or attenuated a lot. In a strictly random winding, you don't get these annoying side-effects.

That said, doesn't mean that "random winding" is "better". It's just different, with potentially more harmonic content, indeed. Doesn't mean that you'll like the sound. Again, it's just different. I agree that some marketing people use this as pure hype, but there is some physical backing to it.

In a nutshell, we can say that it's more difficult to make a strictly regular-wound pickup have a "rich sound". But anyway, I think most industrial pickup winders nowadays have the ability, besides winding in a regular pattern, to wind in pseudo-random patterns too. So you get the "scatter winding" effect, so to speak. You don't need to wind by hand to get it... Some manufacturers will tell you about it, others won't. The bottom line is that you like or don't like their pickups. Who cares about what they tell you? ;-)

[frank falbo]

Yeah I don't mean scatterwinding pickups is marketing hype at all. Just that the term is being used that way. Like because scatterwinding has some sonic "improvements" over a perfect machine wind, folks like Stew Mac are playing off of it to try to convince you to buy some materials and start experimenting. It takes the pressure off the first time builder. But if a pickup maker refers to scatterwinding as why his pups sound "better" it's not hype necessarily. So I'm not talking about marketing pickups, but pickup making materials.

That's why I made the statement reminding everyone that pickups are cheap. If you factor in all the costs, with or without the Schatten machine, making a vintage single coil is going to cost around $15-$30. Street price for a good vintage single is $40-$60. So for all that work, you might not get something as good as a Duncan Vintage Staggered or Alnico your first several times out. It's not worth the labor time. But if I'm designing something unique, then I'll wind. Basically if you can buy something 99% close to what you want, it's worth just buying it. Unless you are really broke and $20 difference can make or break you. But then I'd still recommend scrounging up some broken pickups from local shops and rewinding them, rather than a scratch build.

And yeah, who cares which name brand pups are scatterwound or perfect wound? If I like them, I'll just buy them and play, right?

[javacody]

Off topic, but ***?

Yeah, I'm not sure McDonalds has this anymore, but for a while, they were on a health kick and decided to have an adult happy meal. It included a salad, bottled water, and a pedometer and excercise booklet. I bought it for the pedometer.

[lovekraft]

Whether scatterwinding is hype or not, it does bring up some disturbing logical problems. If scatterwinding is a random (or even pseudo-random) process, then the results would of necessity be random as well, with most pickups falling somewhere near the norm and a few really extreme pickups at either end of the scale, in the old bell-shaped curve. Unless you're convinced that the maker is sorting them and throwing out all those that don't sound exceptionally good, chances are you're going to get a mediocre pickup (since most will end up failry close to the middle ground), and you have a slim chance of getting a really good one or a really bad one. That sounds like a marketing nightmare to me, and I find it hard to believe that any major maker has deliberately set up production machinery to manufacture an inconsistent product. Perhaps they've simply found a winding pattern that approximates a particularly nice scatterwound pickup, and they reproduce it over and over - that would make a lot more economic sense. Of course, it could also be that it doesn't make very much difference, and it is all hype. Just my two cents...

BTW, in pro audio, they call "added harmonic content" distortion, and spend big bucks trying to get rid of it!

[JoeAArthur]

Whether scatterwinding is hype or not, it does bring up some disturbing logical problems. If scatterwinding is a random (or even pseudo-random) process, then the results would of necessity be random as well, with most pickups falling somewhere near the norm and a few really extreme pickups at either end of the scale, in the old bell-shaped curve. Unless you're convinced that the maker is sorting them and throwing out all those that don't sound exceptionally good, chances are you're going to get a mediocre pickup (since most will end up failry close to the middle ground), and you have a slim chance of getting a really good one or a really bad one. That sounds like a marketing nightmare to me, and I find it hard to believe that any major maker has deliberately set up production machinery to manufacture an inconsistent product. Perhaps they've simply found a winding pattern that approximates a particularly nice scatterwound pickup, and they reproduce it over and over - that would make a lot more economic sense. Of course, it could also be that it doesn't make very much difference, and it is all hype. Just my two cents...

BTW, in pro audio, they call "added harmonic content" distortion, and spend big bucks trying to get rid of it! 

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Well, I have to agree with you about scatter winding. Although if the winding is truly random, there won't be a bell-shaped curve.

I lean more towards the total hype explanation myself - having tried a number of pickups from various bow-teak makers. None would qualify as superior in my book... and most fall in the trash bucket category. Luckily there are other fools out there that believe they are superior so I was able to offload them pretty quickly.

I can't believe the bow-teak makers sell microphonic pickups at the price they do.