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While making custom pickups for Cheap Trick back in the early 80’s the instruments were custom built for them by Hamer Guitars. Along with the custom pickups the instruments included custom electronics. I wound individual coils for each string on their basses that included volume controls to balance the output of each string. I believe…

Most epoxied pickups that stop working normally can’t be fixed. It is difficult to remove the epoxy without breaking the coil or bobbins. You can’t repair them properly and several pickup builders pour the epoxy directly on the fine magnet wire. When the epoxy dries, it can shrink and in time break the inner coil….

There are many things that can go wrong when winding pickups. Here are some that can be problems for beginner and experienced winders. Here are a few hand winding problems. Hand winding is often called scatter winding. When winding with to much tension the magnet wire can stretch causing the coil to have a higher…

Single coil pickups can be tapped as many times as you want. You can tap a pickup at desired number of turns or at pre-determined DC resistance. Tapping a pickup at a desired DC resistance takes more time and measuring the resistance at various readings. We have a way of measuring the DC resistance quite…

This can be done and I’ve often wound a pickup with 7800 turns of 42 gauge wire soldered to the normal finish eyelet and continued winding with 43 gauge wire either to a desired number of turns or a determined DC resistance. You need to add another eyelet for proper connections and lead wire connections….

A pickup without a bobbin is usually called an air coil. To wind them, you need a collapsing fixture to hold the coil in place till they are coated with an insulating material such as tape or wax. There have been several pickup models wound with air coils. One example that comes to mind is…

Last year I made some custom Gretsch Style pickups for actor Bill Mumy who played “Will” on the television show “Lost in Space”. It was a fun project and wanted to do the pickups for Bill who is also a great guitarist and song writer. My idea was to wind a standard humbucker with the…

Winding tension is the amount of drag or rate the magnet wire can be pulled through the tension devices without stretching the wire. It is usually measured in grams for the finer magnet wires.

The winding speed is the rate at which the bobbin turns either top coming or top going. The winding speed also determines the rate at which the traverse will automatically follow the set pitch for the magnet wire diameter.

The turns per layer is determined by the traverse width from left to right and the diameter of the particular gauge of magnet wire. Just divide the traverse area by the diameter of the wire and you’ll get the maximum number of turns that will fit side by side in each layer.