Curved pickups? WTF?

[ken]

Hello...

I see what you mean now...

Wind the coil around a round former, when the coil is full collapse one side of the wire coil around the curved blade and secure it! I forgot that a cover is not just a cover, you can use it also to mold the coil inside with potting compound. My bad.

The curved blade polepiece would have to be plain steel with a ceramic mag, since Alnico would be impossible to curve unless it was cast into that shape.

Ken

This is the same problem as winding the odd-shaped coils used in electric motors. The standard approach is to wind the coil on a circular former (which could be a ring of headless nails in a piece of plywood), taping the coil with some kind of fabric tape, removing the taped coil from the former and bending the coil to shape while installing in the motor. When all the coils are installed in the motor, the entire assembly is solidified by twice vacuum-dipping it in a kind of varnish and baking it hard. (Solidification is essential in a motor, as otherwise motor vibration will cause the winding wires to rub against each other and wear through their insulating varnish, shorting the motor winding.)

For pickups, one could do much the same thing, except it might be easier to use nylon fishline in a series of knots instead of tape to hold the coil together while it's being installed with the magnet in the cover. Potting is essential, but wax would probably work. I recall discussions of an "air-coil" pickup made just this way, using a ceramic magnet.

[David Schwab]

The curved blade polepiece would have to be plain steel with a ceramic mag, since Alnico would be impossible to curve unless it was cast into that shape.

It could also be plain steel with an Alnico magnet.