Any valuable info on Lane Poor MM pups?

[David King]

There are plenty of clues in the manufacturing description above.
The "35 minutes" on the winder implies both a slower speed and a lot of turns.

[belwar]

You know, I'm available for consulting work.

Here's a drawing from the patent for the Bill Lawrence Firebird and Thunderbird design. This will show what's going on.

This is a little different from the typical sidewinder though, as the coils are sitting between the magnetic poles. On a typical sidewinder, the magnets are in the coils, and the center is the poles.

How on earth would that be hum cancelling, wouldnt both coils have the same polarity?

[ModulusMK]

David, any ideas on LP MM design? If not drawing any words on important clues?

[David King]

If you haven't been to the Lane Poor community site then it's worth a looksee:
Lane Poor Community Archive

Some descriptions of available models and lots of lore.

Belwar, look at good old Q-tuner pickup site for more images of how sidewinders are supposed to work...

[belwar]

There are plenty of clues in the manufacturing description above.
The "35 minutes" on the winder implies both a slower speed and a lot of turns.

I dont buy that for a second - A quick google search shows that the Maxwell Model 1201-1 is a 5000 RPM winder. That has to be total ammount of labor. Even my first lollar winder was like 9 minutes a coil. At 35 minutes a coil they'd be out of business in no .... oh wait. :>

Also check out the traverse mechanism...

Adams Maxwell 1250 Automatic Traverse

Strange that he used something with a 7" traverse...

[David Schwab]

How on earth would that be hum cancelling, wouldnt both coils have the same polarity?

Don't forget, you have magnetic and electrical polarity.

[ModulusMK]

Lane Poor M3.5HB Soapbar 4 string, Top Coil: 0095(@1000K), 0096(@100K), 5.91K (dcr), Top: 400.00 Gauss, 2 bars minimal spacing
Bottom Coil: 0098(@1000K), 0099(@100K), Top 552.00 Gauss, Bottom -360.00 Gauss

Saying with this also means that the coils are one over another?
What does 0095(@1000K), 0096(@100K) mean?
Can you make a 'hand drawn' pic for how is all this set up please?

[David King]

What does 0095(@1000K), 0096(@100K) mean?

Sorry,
The 0095, 0096 etc. actually refer to separate graph .png files. They don't have any other meaning. I can post those .pngs if you need to see them but they all look pretty similar.

Again the Gauss numbers are magnetic field strengths over the pickup, "Top" and "Bottom" refer to the side by side coils in a Humbucker NOT to upper and lower coils in a stacked humbucker. Top=neck Bottom=bridge

[David King]

Belwar, I don't buy the 35 minute wind time either -unless they were talking about all 4 coils for a pair of pickups. Say 1500 rpm / 9000 turns * 4 coils...

So where are we?

I'm sending off some other examples from my stash to Belwar for Xray but I don't have any of the hbsc (split coils) or any of the various MM configs with one or two pickups inside i.e.: MM4+j,n,w,hb,hbsb, nn, ww, or any of the Dual Voice configs like nw, whb, nhb (if these last two ever even existed).

It would be nice to get a MM pickup from a Modulus Flea bass owner since these are the guys that are knocking down my door 99% of the time looking for NOS Lane poors.

I just hope we can find some clues as to the passive circuit he was employing to get that sharp rise between 6 and 10kHz. Can someone here estimate what that slope is? It's definitely steeper than a 6dB/octave.
Are we looking at some crazy 4th order, Mrs Butterworth band pass filter??

[belwar]

I believe that the PJ set that I bought has one wide and one narrow. The X-ray should show the difference if any in the construction .. even thoug the pickups are totally different designs.

I'm *Considering* buying a modulus flea bass just to hack the pickup out, but it will likely just be the split coil design.. Going off what I read the HBSC and the Dual Coil are the rarest and most highly sought after. Once we get the construction methods, then with some trial an error we can duplicate the effect. If I could even FIND an owner with an HBSC that would be amazing because Idd could get Ohm readings from each coil ..

sigh - off to the googles.

bel.

[David Schwab]

Again the Gauss numbers are magnetic field strengths over the pickup, "Top" and "Bottom" refer to the side by side coils in a Humbucker NOT to upper and lower coils in a stacked humbucker. Top=neck Bottom=bridge

OK that makes sense.

I just hope we can find some clues as to the passive circuit he was employing to get that sharp rise between 6 and 10kHz. Can someone here estimate what that slope is? It's definitely steeper than a 6dB/octave.
Are we looking at some crazy 4th order, Mrs Butterworth band pass filter??

I don't think he had any passive circuit in there. If you look in Erno Zwaan's book, he has examples of pickups with similar dips in their response in the upper range before they drop off, which is where the resonant peak is. Most of the examples are side winders with more than one pole (similar to the Q-Tuners).

So it's likely just phase cancelation artifacts and tuned resonances.

[David King]

Interesting point DavidS. I'll see if there's a q-tuner scan available to us. That would be an interesting point of reference maybe.

It might be easier to start winding some obvious iterations of sidewinders and see if any of them sound anything like LPs.

I remember David Pinton (on mimf) in France posted a sound file of his sidewinder and I thought it sounded terrific at the time. I believe he was using alnicos inside the coils driving steel pole pieces between the coils.
I'll ask him is he still has the file and the details.

My interest would be to fix some of the problems I had with the Lane Poors. Mostly from guys playing larger rooms that were having to do serious EQing inside each room (via 33 band graphic eqs) just to get the FOH and stage cancellations down to a minimum. That extended low end caused a lot of problems. One guy went back to emgs the other went on to Bartolin to solve their issues but in both cases they were much happier post LPs.

[ModulusMK]

I did read that info, from there you can get only the types od pups and their configurations. From here, there and so on we can collect some useful info, at least for beggining.
So this is what we have (talking about MM version):

1. Wire most probably twisted stand (as was told to David Schwab in 'second hand' by Lane)... in that case if we have two conductors connected at the their ends you get double less of the resistance of one conductor? Like normal resistors I guess...

2. Bilateral twin coils, resistance on one ~4K, HB/HBSC configuration

3. 2 Ceramic bar magnets, somewhere 400.00 Gauss

Now waiting for the scans from belwar, also it would be nice to do a magnetic view with the same named paper. That will tell a lot for magnetic field just as well as the x-ray scan for the construction... from here on it will be left only the wire type...

[David King]

Is DS willing to name his source? To me perhaps?
Twisted strand could be litz wire or possibly Gaglio Fantasma bifilar winding that's capacitively coupled.

Villex pickups use a passive capacitor circuit inside so that's not completely unheard of.

In either case we wouldn't be able to take a DCR reading so litz seems the most likely option if it isn't a red herring.

[David Schwab]

Villex pickups use a passive capacitor circuit inside so that's not completely unheard of.

Are you sure about that? I don't know, since I haven't had one to examine, but I presumed he used transformers, based on his previous designs. You can get a passive boost going on with a step up transformer.