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Magnet wire commonly used in guitar pickups is made from 99.9% pure copper and drawn to the desired diameter and annealed to make softer. There are many custom shapes available and magnet wire can be half sizes, bondable and can be made to be 2-20 conductor, parallel bonded and color coded. Specialty magnet wire can…

The number of turns is usually pre-determined when winding various types of pickups. When I wind bobbins or coils, I usually know the number of turns that I need for a particular tone I need in the pickup. The number of turns is the total turns you desire to put onto a coil or bobbin….

This is a pretty common problem with pickups using two magnets like the Gibson P-90. In your case, the magnets are not put back into the pickup right. What is important to remember is that each magnet has a South Polarity (S) and a North polarity (N). The same polarity (both South or both North)…

8.1 Physical Damage: When replacing or working on guitars always be careful that the coil is not damaged in any way. Breaking one turn of the coil will cause it to fail. Magnet wire is an insulated copper wire. Typically 42 AWG (American Wire Gauge) is .0026″ in diameter single build. Much care must be…

I remember one day playing guitar with a friend in his basement and while jamming, his Telecaster guitar became intermittent. We started wiggling the cord, tapping the amp, and finally realized the problem came from the guitar. When we tapped the bridge pickup we could hear it go off and on. Realizing his pickup was…

Either one of the two coils in the humbucking pickup doesn’t work properly or the switch is bad. When you split the pickup, you activate one good coil and cutting out the bad one. The two coils normally work in series when not splitting. To see if the coil or switch are bad, you’ll need…

The easiest way is to start unwrapping the pickup turn by turn and counting the number of turns per layer. I would go down a layer or two before you seriously start counting each turn per layer. As you unwrap you will soon begin to see a pattern of how the wire was put on….

I have seen this happen quite often. Care must be taken when the covers are removed as the solder that is on the cover can snag the tape and coil wires. Most often it can be the taped connections between the two bobbins or connections to the shielded lead wire that’s connected to the bottom…

The first thing to check would be the hookup wire at the end of the cable that’s soldered to the pots or switches. The fine strands of wire at that end can touch making the pickup act like it’s shorted out. Make sure all the insulated wires from each conductor are separated and not touching….

Depending on what kind of pickup you have, there are several things I do. For single coils that have black or gray Vulcanized Fibre for the flatwork (the material that looks like compressed paper) you can use a heating lamp or low temperature oven to slowly melt the excess wax. If you use hot water…