free pickup winder

[Mystic]

http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/msg/964782950.html

[Mystic]

If you go get it, post pictures here.

[kevinT]

someone must of picked it up....the listing isn't there anymore.

[David Schwab]

It was two winders... someone picked them up 45 minutes after the ad was posted.

I wonder why they just gave them away?

[ken]

I emailed this person, and he said a man from Chicago gave him $800 to hold them for him and picked them up 45 minutes later.

Ken

[kevinT]

Wow. They were worth a lot more than that. Especially if they included the Tanac tensioners that were part of the setup. 1 tensioner is $700 alone.

The person got a great deal.

[Possum]

...

there is a big downside to the expensive auto winders. Look at Wolfe, he has a winder that costs $10,000. It also broke and he was down for a couple months and cost a fortune to fix. Its really not necessery to have an expensive winder in fact they are way overkill for pickup making, unless you want to wind 20 pickups at the same time or something large scale. they are designed to wind precision coils for electronics uses. You can build a CNC traverse out of junk parts off Ebay for less than $200, you already have a winding motor and mounting plate right? I'm no genius and I figured it out, it does take work and alot of figuring out how to set it all up but it can be done for dirt cheap....

[kevinT]

there is a big downside to the expensive auto winders. Look at Wolfe, he has a winder that costs $10,000. It also broke and he was down for a couple months and cost a fortune to fix. ....

This is one of the major things that you have to consider when purchasing a CNC winder...at least this is what I did. You have to ask yourself ...how difficult would it be to get parts if it broke down ...and that was one of the major reasons why I purchased the machine that I did. Mine is made in the good ol USA. I took a tour of the plant where they made my winder --in Brockton MA. It is actually a half hour drive from where my wife grew up. They machine most of their parts for their winders right here in the US, in their shop. They can overnight parts if I needed them or I could drive 11 hours pick up parts and drive back 11 hours. The only thing that is imported is the controller which is made in Hong Kong. It can be ordered and delivered in a few days with minumum interuption for me if something were to happen.

Wolfe's machine is a bit more complex than many CNC's on the market. He can program it to do a wide variety of things. It's a trade off. His is more complex and he can do a lot more with his machine, but on the down side it might take a little longer to get parts from manufacturers overseas. I believe his machine is made in Germany and it cost more than $10K. I think he said it was about $15K

Its really not necessery to have an expensive winder in fact they are way overkill for pickup making, unless you want to wind 20 pickups at the same time or something large scale. they are designed to wind precision coils for electronics uses. ....

Folks choose there method of winding and/or a specific machine for a variety of reasons. But I don't think it would be for winding 20 bobbins at a time. Seymour doesn't even do that. It's really not overkill. I can do a lot of stuff with mine from manipulating my programs to actually physically altering my tooling and wire guides and tensioner to do a wide variety of things...I actually have more factors/variables to experiement with for greater tonal options.

[Possum]

...

I can do everything Wolfe's winder and yours can do, my controller board costs $35, the software $55, the stepper motor was $6. The one thing mine won't do is wind "perfect wind" coils with each turn perfectly next to the last, but then those kinds of coils are why people buy hand made pickups in the first place. Every now and then on Ebay I see some nice hi tech winders for sale and just am thankful I never invested alot of money on one, its not something I would ever buy now. It would be cool to have an old mechanical winder like Jason's as a collectible piece of history but basically I don't need anything else. This stuff is so cheap I have backup parts for every piece of it in case anything dies. I run it all on a $150 PC Greg Simon got for me, also have a backup one of those too. HIstorically all the machine wound pickups were wound by crude machines with cams etc. even Fender in the 70's used simple winders when they went to machine winds, Gibson's current winder is still an antique mechanical winder, I don't see the need to spend much on this stuff for myself. The hard part is it took about 3 years to figure out how to make somethng this simple :-)

[kevinT]

yippeeeeee.....Winder Wars!!!!

Everyone has thier reason(s) for choosing the machine that they use to wind thier pickups whether it is financial, someone that likes to tinker and build a machine, time limitations, results of a specific method, uniqueness, or a combination of them.

No one machine/method is better than the other if it is doing what you want it to do and you're getting the tone that you seek. I think its great that folks use different methods...that way it keeps everyone's pickups unique and not sounding all the same then if they were wound by the same method.

[David King]

Hey, my winder can still sew a new elastic in my underpants albeit with copper thread.

[David Schwab]

Man, I wanted that free winder! I would have even paid for it.

[Possum]

....

One thing to be real careful of if you consider buying a mechanical winder off ebay like the Bacchi or George Stevens winders is that alot of them don't come with any extra gear sets etc. and the sellers don't know much anything about them, so you may get a winder that does ONE traverse rate only, very few of them have built in variability for traverse rate. I nearly bought one before I did my own and at the last minute the guy told me it could only do one thing, extra parts to change that cost a fortune to buy. Yeah everyone uses different stuff and thats good and thats why I don't show mine to anyone because I don't want others winding like I can, I just wanted to point out that if you really want an auto winder you can do it for dirt cheap and its not all that hard to figure out, you just need to like to tinker and be good at inventing and building parts to make it all work. I could probably build and sell these, put some fancy cover on it or something and make good money but it would be boring work :-)

[ken]

Geo. Stevens winder

Boy is Possum right...

I bought a Geo. Stevens winder and another for parts, and I learned the gears were over $80 each and cams were same price. Even if I could afford to fix it, it would only do one thing. Then I was going to make it CNC, but I didn't have the time to learn how to write a VB program to make all work either. Instead, I made it work semiautomatically with a DC motor and a singleaxis CNC board I bought on Ebay.

A mechanical winder is great for 'bragging rights', but unfortunately it only does one thing well. If you want to tailor its wind, doing so is going to be very spendy indeed. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have bothered to fix this one.

Merry Christmas,
ken

[soundmasterg]

Yeah, when I get some money I'm going to duplicate what Possum did for myself....I'll just be a hobbyist probably, but it would be nice to have a winder that can do it all and I won't have to sit there and tediously guide it all day long. I like Wolfe's winder too, but it costs WAY too much for my taste......but then Wolfe is driving around in Porsches so he's living on a different plane than me!

greg