Category Archives:

Here are a few of my own suggestions and other friends of mine. Don’t realign or push the poles down on single coil pickups. Vintage design pickups usually have the magnet wire in direct contact with the pole pieces. The older sand cast magnets have pits and voids where the magnet wire can settle as…

Plating is the method of covering the covers with a thin coat of metal done by electrodeposition. The gold used on covers is usually 24 karat in color and uses a specific chemical process in combination with or without electricity. Plating is used to keep the metallic object from either rusting or oxidizing over time….

You can split a humbucker by connecting a lead wire to the two finish wires in each coil. When you connect the lead wire to ground, it shorts one of the coils out leaving one coil operative. When you split a Gibson style humbucker, the stud side or non-adjustable side is operative and the adjustable…

The most common way is to look for the black hookup wire. The majority of pickup companies connect the black and ground wire to the beginning of the coil. The beginning of the coil is wound directly to the rod magnets in vintage style single coil pickups. Looking at the pickup from the top and…

Normally hardware used on musical instruments is either machined, cast or fabricated with some material suitable and plated either to cover up the cosmetic appearance of the bare or raw material or plated for longer durability. Many pole pieces are in their natural cast state and are not plated and as the instrument is played…

The term BOM mean bill of materials and is important when manufacturing products. It’s basically the list of all items that are used to make a product. You can have a part number, inventory, location, vendor, cost and amount used in making a product. A simple BOM list for a pickup can be as follows…

By changing your pickups you can do several things to change or enhance the tone of your instrument. Many times the wood and finish can make the instrument sound harsh or dull from synthetic finishes that are to thick. Changing your pickups can enhance the qualities in your instrument. In guitar production, pickups are basically…

Arbor: This is the device that holds the coil form in place next to the coil machine’s main shaft that rotates. It holds the coil snug as it’s being wound. The pickup fastens to the winding arbor and keeps the pickups from flying off when the pickup is winding. AWG: American Wire Gauge. This is…

Many kinds of plastic parts and pickup bobbins are made by injection molding more than any other way. A screw plasticating principle widely used in plastic extruders was adapted to injection molding. The tooling is quite elaborate with special plates and gates to control the flow of plastics, which is forced into the cavity of…

Depending on the design of the pickup there are a few basic parts in which pickups are made: A. a permanent magnet; B. pole pieces; C. coil or coils; D. bobbin A permanent magnet can be made of several types of material IE: Alnicos & Ceramic being the most common. There are several grades of…