Wind Your Own Pickups

[moon]

Finished my first humbucker today using a kit from Tub Guitars. It was surprisingly easy to do and, although one of the coils had a fault, the one that worked actually sounded pretty good so I'm starting to feel more confident that I'll end up with a nice pickup after a few more tries.

From what I've learned so far, I think the way to approach this is to expect to do a lot of experiments to find out how to get the best from your materials. I'll probably buy more bobbins and magnets, do several different winds, then try the coils out in different combinations with different kinds of magnet before choosing the best pairing for the final humbucker. It's not all going to fall perfectly into place on the first attempt but winding a good quality pickup does look very do-able with a bit of experimenting.

So, if you have a DIY streak, I'd recommend you give it a go. There's a lot of information around on the net about pickup winding. Here's a video of a humbucker being made to get you started.

[Davis Webb]

Fascinating. I would love to hear your pickups when done. I love this kind of stuff, it should be possible to produce em for 10 bucks a pop once you have the gear to do it.

[moon]

I didn't need to spend much on gear. The only thing I've had to buy is this LCR meter. Any old multi meter will do to check continuity but I wanted to be able to measure inductance, capacitance and resistance.

For a winder, I just used a sewing machine with a strip of wood bolted onto the end. The bobbins were mounted onto that with double sided tape. A cycle computer (ie speedometer) made a good turns counter - it's important to keep track of the number of turns. 5,000 per coil seems to be the standard for a PAF humbucker.

I'll post some clips at the weekend once I've rewound the faulty coil. I was kind of expecting something to go wrong on my first attempt but it's not a major setback. The wire is quite delicate (I used 42 awg) but if you handle it carefully and make sure there's nothing for it to snag on it's really no problem to work with.

The really encouraging thing is how much bite and attack the working coil has. With overdrive, there's more individual string definition. That's exactly what I was looking for to replace some very muddy stock pickups in my Epiphone dot (it's an old model I got second hand; Epiphone have upgraded their pups in their latest guitars).