Akula

Yes...in principle...generally though there won't be enough room on the poles that are sticking out above your average single coil pickup to wind a driver and accommodate a bobbin to fit it all on. I take it you have seen my pictorial on this...Link... The poles stick up about 3mm from the top of the bobbin, on these pickups anyways, they're pretty cheap pickups lol. About how many turns do I need? 8 ohms needed, right?

Okay, another set of "you think this will work?" questions... I have a lot of strat pickups lying around. Do you think it would work if I took the polepieces that stick out the top of the pickup as the core for a driver, so I'd just wrap the wire around the tops of the pole peices, to have a driver on top of a pickup? (obviously use in the neck position, with the bridge pickup driving the circuit) Also, if I have the cheap ceramic magnet that you usually find stuck to the bottom of a strat pickup, and I coil the wire around that, perhaps that would work as a nice thin driver? My apologies if these questions are dumb. I've only got a 100m reel of wire, and my current guitar build is sucking up a lot of my money lol, so I'd rather ask dumb questions before winding Oh, and I'm sure it doesnt cost that much for a PIC programming circuit... Last year in a school project I made a PIC-powered clock, and I even built the programming circuit into my PCB. Most people in my class didnt bother, they just programmed their PIC's with a quick-n-dirty breadboard.

Oh, just in case anybody's wondering, my .315mm driver works alright on my bass guitars. E and A strings are very lively. I have yet to make or test a .2mm driver, I've had this roll of wire on my desk for a few weeks now without getting around to winding it, when I get around to it I'll post up my results with the bass. I agree the nylon strings and vibrating top could limit the usefulness of an acoustic sustainer, but perhaps on a solid body guitar the piezo pickups could be of use? We wouldnt have the problem of the top vibrating the driver, and the interference problems would be lesser, I imagine... Piezo pickup on the bridge, neck driver, contained in one easy-to-mount sustainer system?

Well one way to find out if it'll work, an hour or two in front of the soldering iron and an oscilloscope... Might as well, I have the time. I was doing some thinking about the EMI interference problems. Its my understanding that the horrible squeal is heard because the driver's magnetic field is influencing the pickup, so you get a sort of feedback thats magnetic, it bypasses the strings. Well I had an idea - You have the middle pickup going to the sustainer circuitry, it doesnt go to the guitar's output at all. Then, the bridge pickup goes directly to the guitar output, doesnt go through any sustainer circuitry. Surely the EMI feedback would be contained in the sustainer circuit, which isnt heard? And the bridge pickup doesnt drive the sustainer, so there wouldnt be any feedback there? Just an idea, i'm sure its flawed and i'm sure somebody else has suggested it over the last 295 pages, but yeah I thought I'd bring it up

Ah, something like this? http://www.maplin.co.uk/Media/PDFs/N46FL.pdf

Hey, I've found a 1W amp circuit sold by Maplin, and I'm thinking it might be a cheap and easy circuit to play around with. Here's a link to the amp: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Media/PDFs/N48FL.pdf It'll need modifying, most certainly, but it'll be interesting to see if it works at all. I'll get one at the weekend and start playing around with it. I'm not looking for an easy way out of building my own circuit, but for the price, I'm willing to take a look and see if its workable. I'll keep you guys posted.

Oky. I'll try a design with .2mm wire. I'm also trying to make a scratchplate out of aluminium, so I'll have some of that lying around, which could be useful for making bobbins. Its non-magnetic, so it should be ok, right? The plastic i used for my current driver was taken from the trem cover of this guitar lol, and its not particularly sturdy. And the first driver I made, well, it kinda got clamped a bit too hard when the glue was drying, and it ended up about an inch tall. Oops. Wire's cheap. I'll try again this weekend

Okay, dunno if you remember me from a few pages back, but I got my sustainer working. I used a bit of steel about 3mm thick, 10mm high, and about 60mm wide. Clamped it in a vice, about halfway, and wound about 150 turns of .315mm wire around it, drenching the thing in PVA glue while i did so. After the glue had dried, I popped a pickup magnet under it, put it in my neck pickup space, and hooked it up to my Ruby amp circuit. Well, it sustains the A string, and the G, and sometimes the low E. Does anyone know why this is? Something to do with my wire being .315mm instead of .2mm? Also, I'm getting distortion, acoustically. I'm guessing this is because my circuit's maxed out on gain and volume, so the sustainer coil is distorting the shape of the strings' vibration. How might I go about solving this? If I turn down the gain much, I cant get anything to sustain, not powerful enough, again i suspect its something to do with the wire size. Or perhaps I need this "Fetzer" thing everybody talks about - but I cant find anything about it from googling. Perhaps I need to search these forums, I shall do that in just a moment... Overall, not bad. About £20 I've spent on this so far, and after reading this thread I was a little concerned it wouldnt work at all. So, as you can imagine, I'm rather pleased so far Cheers, Akula

Yeah I intend to replace the missing bridge pickup with a humbucker. So my config would be H-S-S, with a driver next to the neck pickup. And yes, only the bridge pickup would be used with the sustainer, to avoid all that nasty squealing. Okay, fair enough. I'll get some more wire. Yep, my circuit has a transistor. This "extra filtering" you say, whats do you mean by this, just more capacitors to take out certain freqencies? Oh and on the subject of the circuit, I'm a little confused as to how the harmonics effects work. Does this require extra circuitry, or will a plain old Ruby circuit get me those really high harmonic notes? Haha, yeah, I must have taken off the pickguard to this guitar about five times in the last week, quite frustrating. The trem cavity will probably hold the battery, if not I'm willing to rout out some more wood. Thats the great thing about modding a cheap guitar - if it fails, its not like losing a really expensive guitar. I'm more of a bass player, and this guitar was a bit of an "Oh why not" kind of purchase. It cost me about £30, so it's both a play-around guitar and a testbed for future guitar mods/making. I'm planning my first guitar build, a 5-string bass, but this is going to be far into the future, and off-topic Cheers for all the help - Akula

Well the guitar I'm using as the "testbed" is a cheap strat copy, y'know, the kind you can buy almost anywhere. Has the worst sustain I've ever seen, hence why I'm trying to sustainerize it. I might take out the bridge pickup and turn it into a driver (obviously, in the neck position), I'll look into this tommorow. I see a few problems with my situation. Firstly, I have .315mm wire, not the .2mm that I read seems to work best. I'll order some more wire from ebay sometime, along with some magnets for future drivers. But for the time being I may as well wire it up into that pickup, see if I can get any kind of result. Secondly, I've built a Ruby circuit, not a Fetzer-Ruby. Is this usable, I mean, whats the difference, just a different amount of gain or output power? - Akula

Okay, thanks. So would it be a good idea to buy a few dozen neodymium disk magnets, and stack them underneath my driver, increasing the number of magnets until i hit the "sweet spot" where it works best? Oh and what works well as a core, just a block of ferrite magnet, or a bar of iron or steel? Sorry with all the questions, hopefully I'll soon learn enough to be able to start answering questions instead of asking them all, lol. - Akula

Hello guys, I've been skulking around these forums for a few weeks, thought it was about time I actually registered and started posting. I saw a post, on around page 80 (i think. this is a big thread ), which showed a driver design. Top and bottom of the bobbin were made out of a CD case, with a steel core and a magnet underneath. Seems like the generic driver design around here. Well anyways, I'm looking to build a driver, but I was thinking, is it really just an electromagnet? Surely you dont need the magnets underneath the driver, just a steel or iron core and a coil around it? I'm certain I've misunderstood something vital here, but I thought I'd post anyways, hopefully somebody can set me on the right tracks. Thanks.