Leesona 102 Updated

[JGundry]

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension. The counters are Red Lion Cub 5's. A relay trips the solenoid to stop the wind when the preset count is reached. I can toggle to confirm the RPM for each station and also toggle to the variable clutch to do different TPL counts precisely. The Chucks have a rare earth magnet mounted in them with a hall sensor to trigger the counter. I did a complete tear down. Rebuilt the clutches, new bearings and vibration damper on the drive shaft. It should be good for another 80 years of service. It's a sweet set-up.

[kevinT]

Jon...you da Man!!!!!

That is a really sweet setup. Any chance in doing a video and posting on YouTube? I would love to see it in action

[JGundry]

Thanks Kevin. I'm sure I will post video on YouTube at some point.

[David Schwab]

Ooh, that looks nice! I love old machines. You did a great job restoring and updating it.

[JGundry]

Originally Posted by David Schwab

Ooh, that looks nice! I love old machines. You did a great job restoring and updating it.

Thanks David. Helping my dad restore a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as a teen turned out to be a useful experience when it came to dealing with a old oily coil winder that needed to be ripped apart and cleaned.

[kevinT]

heck, maybe you and possum (with his video skills) can team up and do a documentary on PAFs and how they were made

[Joe Gwinn]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension.

Looking at that tensioner, I understand why you had to bypass it. The dancer (the black wheel on the black rod) is far too heavy for such thin wire, given the oblong shape of the bobbin onto which the wire is being wound. The wire motion must be unsteady with such a bobbin.

That said, I'm interested in the details of that tensioner. Could you take some high definition photos from various angles? Thanks.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Thanks David. Helping my dad restore a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as a teen turned out to be a useful experience when it came to dealing with a old oily coil winder that needed to be ripped apart and cleaned.

Damn that's a nice car! I had some old cars in the past... a 1963 Benz 190 (with the tailfins) and more recently a nice 1980 BMW.. I forget the model, but it was the small one. But that ended up needing to be rewired, and I sold it at that point. I had enough with rewiring my first car, a Bradley GT. Bad grounds in cars are no fun!

I'd love to see more details on the Leesona.

[JGundry]

I'll scan the detailed line drawing of the tensioner from the manual and post it. It's probably better than photos.

[Possum]

"Dancers" just don't work for pickups at all. I had the Azonic that was made for pickup size wire. the spring dancer that shows tension in grams would start bobbing then just get out of control at winding speeds and broke the wire every time. If you go look at TV Jones website gallery photos you'll see he uses Azonics but by passes the meter spring. If you look at Gibson's winders in recent videos they don't use tensioners at all but felt tensioners, Duncan does the same. Some of them may use dereelers like whisker discs but pretty much everyone uses felt or a tensioner with the spring piece bypassed. If you use a flourescent light to illuminate your winder you can see a sort of strobe effect on the bouncing magnet wire, you'll see multiple frequencies of the bobbing wire, its a pretty intense jerking motioin tensioners can't handle. Personally I use felt and a thumbscrew, low tech seems the best way to go....

[Joe Gwinn]

Originally Posted by Possum

"Dancers" just don't work for pickups at all. I had the Azonic that was made for pickup size wire. the spring dancer that shows tension in grams would start bobbing then just get out of control at winding speeds and broke the wire every time. If you go look at TV Jones website gallery photos you'll see he uses Azonics but by passes the meter spring. If you look at Gibson's winders in recent videos they don't use tensioners at all but felt tensioners, Duncan does the same. Some of them may use dereelers like whisker discs but pretty much everyone uses felt or a tensioner with the spring piece bypassed. If you use a flourescent light to illuminate your winder you can see a sort of strobe effect on the bouncing magnet wire, you'll see multiple frequencies of the bobbing wire, its a pretty intense jerking motioin tensioners can't handle. Personally I use felt and a thumbscrew, low tech seems the best way to go....

I'll grant you that tensioners with dancers made for winding transformer coils and the like (using heavier wire and almost round bobbins) won't work on a pickup. But it does not follow that a purpose-built tensioner using a dancer won't work, and a dancer could help greatly in smoothing the jerking due to the oblong bobbin. I've been thinking about the mechanics for some time, and I'm curious to see in detail how the Leesona tensioners work. They look a bit like the Meteor tensioners as well. Even though they are not built for pickup winding, such tensioners are a good and traditional design.

By the way, the out-of-control bobbing implies that the bobbin rotation rate landed on a mechanical resonance of the dancer. Dancers work only if their lowest resonant frequency exceeds the highest frequency in the wire motion. A big pulley on a long thin stalk will have a relatively low resonant frequency.

[Joe Gwinn]

Originally Posted by JGundry

I'll scan the detailed line drawing of the tensioner from the manual and post it. It's probably better than photos.

Probably so. Thanks.

[kevinT]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension.]

I was rereading this post...how did Gibson prevent this from happening?

I have the operating manual too....There are some assumptions that i have about the machine and tensioners that i have incorporated into the formula for my PAF-style models.

[Dave Kerr]

Dumb question, but has anyone tried varying the speed within each rotation to smooth out the wire feed rate? Not that I'd have a clue as to how to go about it...

[JGundry]

Originally Posted by kevinT

I was rereading this post...how did Gibson prevent this from happening?

I have the operating manual too....There are some assumptions that i have about the machine and tensioners that i have incorporated into the formula for my PAF-style models.

Seymour's Leesona looks to be updated with some sort of felt tensioning pulley at the top where the original tensioner would have been. This functionally is identical to simply bypassing the tension wheel on the original tensioner. Seymour also has a second alligator clip with felt in it holding the wire just before the wire guide. The alligator clip does not add a huge amount of tension but the combination of the thumb screw felt tensioner on the original tensioner and the alligator clip give just the right amount of tension to make a nice tight bobbin. There are several things on Seymour's machine that are not original. It has plastic wire guide pulleys and has the original tensioners removed. Whether he or Gibson did this I don't know but they both look like fairy recent additions. Certainly not 50's era additions from the looks of the machine. I think that the bypassing of the tensioning wheel is the likely way it was done at Gibson from the beginning.

The manual has very detailed instruction on how to adjust the tensioners. But the dancers jerking because of the oblong bobbins was an issue. I think it would be possible to make them work but I doubt they would wind a coil as tightly as the felt method. The PAF coils that I have unwound have all been very tightly wound. I lost patience trying to get the tensioners to work. Every time I thought I had it the wire would eventually break. I can't imagine them being used in a factory environment when simply bypassing the tension wheel and just using the felt tensioner works so well.

[JGundry]

Here is a detail of the tensioner.

[chevalij]

Have you thought of adding a spinning dummy bobbin/cam ahead of the one you are winding. You could install it 90 degrees to the one you wind. The tensioner should see it as half the velocity change. Pain in the but, and probably not worth the effort, but would be cool to try

[David King]

So let me get this straight, the wire comes up off the spool,
through a hoop,
through an electromagnetic tensioner,
1 loop around a large wheel that has a spring-clutch tensioner,
up over the "dancer" pulley
and down to the guide.?

I take that back, I see now it's a thumb screw tensioner -not an electromagnet.

That dancer could be a tiny carbon fiber tube with just a delrin loop at the end to raise the resonance. Some sort of magnetic dampot like on a triple beam balance scale could control the runaway dancing.

[Spence]

Right, I've stayed out of this for some time to allow Jon free range to talk about what he's done with this machine.
Perhaps we can now see why these machines were never really very good for winding pickups. The T-Top winders are still in use so those machines must have been designed for the purpose with these issues ironed out.

It wouldn't be a giant leap of logic to accept that the tensioning may have been done by hand. I've worked with a lot of antiquated machinery resolving issues like this. very often machinery is aquired that's not quite fit for purpose having been designed for something else. When a part of that machine doesn't work in the new application the problem gets solved by throwing poorly-paid workers at it.

[JGundry]

Originally Posted by Spence

Right, I've stayed out of this for some time to allow Jon free range to talk about what he's done with this machine.
Perhaps we can now see why these machines were never really very good for winding pickups. The T-Top winders are still in use so those machines must have been designed for the purpose with these issues ironed out.

It wouldn't be a giant leap of logic to accept that the tensioning may have been done by hand. I've worked with a lot of antiquated machinery resolving issues like this. very often machinery is aquired that's not quite fit for purpose having been designed for something else. When a part of that machine doesn't work in the new application the problem gets solved by throwing poorly-paid workers at it.

Spence you are so over the top negative about this issue it's hilarious to me. I'm just going to say it. You really do not know what you are talking about concerning this machine or any other vintage Gibson winder. But hey this is an open forum and you are free to say what you like no matter how far from reality it may stray.

Here are some facts. The coils on most PAF's and coils made by this machine are way tighter and neater than any T-Top coil I have ever unwound. Gibson also had two Leesona 102's in use until they moved from the Kalamazoo plant.

In addition there is current video for all to see showing that Gibson currently uses felt tensioners on one of its old winders. This is the video done of the making of the Clapton model 335. The leap is to think that they would have ever wasted time hand tensioning a multi bobbin winder at the Gibson plant.

[JGundry]

Originally Posted by David King

So let me get this straight, the wire comes up off the spool,
through a hoop,
through an electromagnetic tensioner,
1 loop around a large wheel that has a spring-clutch tensioner,
up over the "dancer" pulley
and down to the guide.?

I take that back, I see now it's a thumb screw tensioner -not an electromagnet.

That dancer could be a tiny carbon fiber tube with just a delrin loop at the end to raise the resonance. Some sort of magnetic dampot like on a triple beam balance scale could control the runaway dancing.

My goal is recreate what the original Gibson tensioning system was. I could alter this thing but I have good reason to believe this is the Gibson correct set-up. Plus it work like a charm the way it is set-up now.

[Spence]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Spence you are so over the top negative about this issue it's hilarious to me. I'm just going to say it. You really do not know what you are talking about concerning this machine or any other vintage Gibson winder. But hey this is an open forum and you are free to say what you like no matter how far from reality it may stray.

Here are some facts. The coils on most PAF's and coils made by this machine are way tighter and neater than any T-Top coil I have ever unwound. Gibson also had two Leesona 102's in use until they moved from the Kalamazoo plant.

In addition there is current video for all to see showing that Gibson currently uses felt tensioners on one of its old winders. This is the video done of the making of the Clapton model 335. The leap is to think that they would have ever wasted time hand tensioning a multi bobbin winder at the Gibson plant.

I wasn't being negative at all. The fact is that neither you nor I know for sure how they got around the problems that you were having with these tensioners.
You're being negative Jon. There are loads of pickup makers in the world and none of them chose to buy that Leesona. I wouldn't want it ever. I would have one of the originals for a museum piece but that's all. I understand that you want to recreate the perfect PAF and that's a really good thing to aim for and I will give you well deserved credit if you achieve that. Until then you should perhaps learn a little respect for the people who are out there doing it day-in day-out.

[kevinT]

Originally Posted by Spence

There are loads of pickup makers in the world and none of them chose to buy that Leesona.

I wanted it and I was actually going to buy it. My finger was on the mouse ready to click the Buy It Now button....then the voices in my head, especially the one screeching voice that broke through the noise which sounded like my wife, that said..."DON'T YOU DARE!!! ....you have enough unfinished projects around the house to finish and your NOT going to start another project until you finish those!!!"

After that awful delusion, I closed ebay down...clicked on the Ampage forum...and posted the link for you guys.

[Possum]

The video Jon is talking about shows their current winder and its an old machine, not something new. Its as low tech as the Lessona was, and I suspect was bought after the Leesonas wore out and couldn't really be repaired. The fact they are using felt tensioners there to me indicates thats what was used back then. If something works you don't mess with it. I'm sure that Seymour had to sink a bunch of money into the Leesonas to to get them up to snuff, I do know that the extra one they have they use for parts. Maybe the working one has alot of parts scavenged off that machine as well. Another thing to consider is the type of tensioner that came with the machine, there is no way they would have been able to get tight tension using that thing, it would be even more prone to snapping the wire under tight tension. In theory they could have figured out by passing the dancer but knowing Gibson mentality which basically hasn't changed over the years, they probably just threw them away and used felt tensioning. Its too bad that there doesn't seem to exist any photos of their winding process from that period of time like Fender has.

[JGundry]

Originally Posted by Spence

I wasn't being negative at all. The fact is that neither you nor I know for sure how they got around the problems that you were having with these tensioners.
You're being negative Jon. There are loads of pickup makers in the world and none of them chose to buy that Leesona. I wouldn't want it ever. I would have one of the originals for a museum piece but that's all. I understand that you want to recreate the perfect PAF and that's a really good thing to aim for and I will give you well deserved credit if you achieve that. Until then you should perhaps learn a little respect for the people who are out there doing it day-in day-out.

Sorry Spence. I misunderstood your comments and your motivation. Please accept my apology.

I'm happy to have the machine and have it back to working flawlessly. I always enjoy restoring old machinery like this. It may sound goofy but I feel like I'm paying a sort of Karmic tribute to the machine and the people who made it by respectfully restoring and updating it to working condition. I bet a bunch of these machines just ended up as scrap over time which is a shame. I'm sure I'm not the only one that gets satisfaction from projects like this. The fact that the pickups made on it sound so sweet is like triple the icing on the cake for a PAF fan.

[NightWinder]

Thanks for sharing Jon...Very Cool. Sometimes restoring and fine tuning these older machines can be a huge challenge testing patience and the thrill of finally getting somewhere and operable is a great accomplishment. We're all giant kids in a candy store for this shit. This was a big gamble for you Jon buying this. Glad to see your determintation and hard work prevailing. Im sure it will only get better. Great stuff.

[Possum]

Actually I think I saw it on Ebay too, I thought well cool, a huge risk for one thing and a long fix it up project and in the end it would probably be more frustrating to use than my own home built winder which can do the same wind anyway. I'm glad one of us got it and not Seymour or someone else. No place to put it here either, damn garage is full of machine and power tools already. I don't think I would have had the patience to get it working....

[soundmasterg]

Yah we all know that if it would have come with free beer you would have bought it Possum.

Greg

[Joe Gwinn]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Here is a detail of the tensioner.

I think I understand it, although some more of the surrounding text would be helpful. As would be a photograph of the back side. Or, drawing, if they have one.

Is there a thin metal band wrapped partway around a drum behind the big aluminum wheel with four holes in it? The band might have cork or leather glued to it.

I bet that mechanism takes some skill to correctly adjust.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by Joe Gwinn

I bet that mechanism takes some skill to correctly adjust.

Yeah, that's a whole lot of adjustable parts! Whole lot of parts in general.

[Spence]

[I]PAF Mysteries and the Leesona 102

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Why do PAF's vary so widely in resistance?

The Leesona 102 is a 3 station winder. Each of these 3 stations have separate start levers. The manner in which it is usually run is for one station to be set up and started and then the operator moves on to the next station to set it up until all 3 stations are running. If the winding is timed as Gibson apparently did for most of the PAF era you end up with 3 bobbins with staggered turn counts for each run of the machine. Throw the wound bobbins in a box and it is anyone's guess what you end up with for resistance of the finished pickup. The Leesona 102 did in fact come with manual counters with auto shutoffs. However the gears that runs the counters are fiber gears and not very durable in a day to day use situation. I believe that by the time PAF's were being wound it is quite likely that all of the Leesona 102 counters had failed and Gibson had long since abandoned then and gone to the timing method of stopping the coil wind.

So why didn't Gibson just get spare parts? Doesn't make a lot of sense to abandon the auto-shut-offs. Manual shut-off must be a huge pain in the ass for the operator.Did you ever find proof that they switched to a timing method?

What accounts for the widely varying winding patterns of PAF's?

The Leesona 102 was never exclusively used for any one pickup model. Consequently it would require a set up change for each different model wound on it. And each time it was reset up to do a PAF the parameters of the winding pattern would have to be changed. Some of these adjustments are very crude on the Leesona 102 and operators would only be able to do a ballpark adjustment at best which would mean wide variations in winding pattern between set ups. I have retro fitted my own Leesona 102 with dial indicators in order to make set ups repeatable and to allow for accurate experimentation between them. But the original machine is not capable of having some of the parameters fine tuned beyond a trial and error set up without this retrofit. So good enough would be all that was aimed for by the operator resulting in widely varying winding patterns.

What factors account for the erratic and sometimes hand wound character of PAF coils winding patterns?

Have you now worked out the definitive answer to this question?

The above factors in user setup account for much of the variation. But another important factor is the tolerances inherent in the machine itself. The Leesona 102 is designed to do coils as large as 3". At 3" the tolerances of the cam and other mechanisms of the machine are negligible. But if you ratchet the traverse down to 1/4" for a PAF bobbin these same tolerances now become a very large percentage of the now very small 1/4" traverse of the wire guide. The result is a sometimes very non linear wire traverse when compared to a modern computer guided winding machine or even compared to the same machine at a 3" traverse.

Why does the wire diameter vary with PAF pickups and why do the bobbins warp?

The first simple answer concerning wire diameter is that the difference between maximum and minimum tolerances of 42AWG plain enamel magnet wire. But this is not the whole story. The Leesona 102 came with tensioners that were only designed to accommodate 40AWG magnet wire. This means that when you use the thinner 42AWG wire it is very easily is stretched. My Leesona 102 has the original functioning wire tensioners and I can attest that they are a pain to set up. The only other functional Leesona 102 I am aware of uses a whisker disk for tensioning and I completely understand why as it is a breeze to set up. But if you don't use the original tensioners this higher tension factor can be lost. The additional tension makes for a very tightly wound coil which encourages the warpage of the already soft butyrate bobbins.

Considering the importance of the original tensioners and not wanting to lose the originality of the machine's wind/tension characteristics, can you be sure the felt tensioner you're using now is an exact substitute?


Other facts about the Leesona 102.

The Leesona 102 came with a standard gear set from the factory that would give several very specific turn per layer numbers. This turn per layer count is independent of the traverse travel adjustment. So the same gear set would give the same turn per layer count for a 1/4" bobbin or a 3" bobbin. In my experience there is only one PAF turn per layer number and this is one that the Leesona 102 would do with the stock factory gear sets. I have heard of another turn per layer count for PAF's but cannot confirm this personally with my own PAF research. But interestingly enough this other turn per layer count does jibe with the factory gear sets of the Leesona 102. So perhaps the two Leesona 102 winders Gibson had were set to two different turn per layer counts. But this again is speculation on my part which I have not confirmed to my satisfaction.

You only need work out how many turns will fit in 1/4" with the diameter of whatever 42 AWG you have to come up with the TPL.


The Leesona 102 had one cam for all traverse sizes and turn per layer counts. The ingenious design of the Leesona 102 means that one cam covers the territory for all winding scenarios of the machine. Knowing this when I first got my Leesona 102 winder I feared that the cam might be significantly worn. But the Leesona 102 is a mammoth machine that is way over engineered for what it does. The cam itself sits in a pool of oil as do most of the other moving parts of the winder. This meant the cam and in fact every other important mechanism on my Leesona 102 showed wear that was nearly non existent.
[I]

If you change the tensioning method and dispense with the mechanical counters and auto shut-off can you still say your pickups are PAF clones made just they were by Gibson?
I can fully appreciate the modifications that you've made but I suspect Gibson would have had considerably more customer support from Leesona than you've had. Spares issues and set-up issues would definately been sorted out by Leesona's engineers.
Perhaps, as you live so close to Kalamazoo, you might be able to track down someone who worked on the Leesonas. Just a thought.

[JGundry]

Spence I think I have already addressed every one of these items in detail. If you want to PM me I can fill you in on anything you missed.

One thing I'm not clear about is the phrase "hand wound nature" you used. Are you saying PAF's were hand wound?

You might find the tensioners on this Gibson PAF winder interesting.
Historic PAF Winder Found!

[Spence]

Originally Posted by JGundry

Spence I think I have already addressed every one of these items in detail. If you want to PM me I can fill you in on anything you missed.

One thing I'm not clear about is the phrase "hand wound nature" you used. Are you saying PAF's were hand wound?

You might find the tensioners on this Gibson PAF winder interesting.
Historic PAF Winder Found!

Uh, no I didn't use the phrase 'hand wound nature' in my questions above all typed in that annoying blue text. I don't think you've addressed those questions anywhere which is why I asked them. I did see your other post about this historic find. Can't wait to see your own photos as you'll be able to look at the whole machine and not just the tensioners.

[JGundry]

Oh yeah your right. I already addressed that. You can probably find it or connect the dots easily enough.

I may show more pics of the other winder. It is a super cool find.

[Sheldon Dingwall]

Originally Posted by David Schwab

Damn that's a nice car! I had some old cars in the past... a 1963 Benz 190 (with the tailfins) and more recently a nice 1980 BMW.. I forget the model, but it was the small one. But that ended up needing to be rewired, and I sold it at that point. I had enough with rewiring my first car, a Bradley GT. Bad grounds in cars are no fun!

I'd love to see more details on the Leesona.

You had a Bradley GT??!! Cool! Which version, 1 or 2?