Another Dickhead

[Zhangliqun]

1) No need to defend handwounds; they are their own defense, they speak for themselves loud and clear.

2) Someone selling great pu's undervalued is never going to be able to sell them at a big enough volume to be a threat to the handwinding community as a whole.

3) I don't see how the pickup winding industry is the one industry in all the world that should be exempt from the 'ripple effect' of cheap knock-offs. Every maker of quality anything deals with it like airplane designers deal with drag.

A far greater threat, or at least potential threat, that has been mentioned in here once or twice is the big boys buying all the parts suppliers to put us little guys out of business.

I don't know if that's actually happening or not but as they see Lollars and Wolfes and Timbuckers etc., etc., continue to get killer reviews and the e-bay winders popping out of the woodwork and following in their footsteps -- a small but inevitable percentage of them discovering they actually have a talent for this line of work -- the big boys' concerns about loss of market share might drive them to do something like that, if it hasn't already.

[JGundry]

Although hand winding gives a craftsman mystique to a pickup anyone mechanically inclined can do it. Hand wound is not enough in itself to make a great pickup so it is not your best marketing tool. I have both hand and computerized winders and both methods can produce great pickups. Since most individual winders can't afford a computerized coil winder those makers that have hand winding experience to apply towards computerized winding have a real advantage when it comes to precise repeatable control between different models of pickups. My guess is that between Lollar, Wolfe and Fralin there is little if any hand winding going on and if there is it is the exception. I'm not knocking hand winding as I enjoy hand winding as well. Some great Fender pickups were hand wound but on the other side of it PAF's and P-90's were not hand wound and never were. I think to cover it all you have to know what you are doing in both realms. So hand winding by itself is meaningless. Quality and consistency are what make for happy customers not price or method.

[Spence]

"Some great Fender pickups were hand wound but on the other side of it PAF's and P-90's were not hand wound and never were"

You're wrong about PAFs. Gibson had two autowinders. One on the shop floor and one in Seth Lover's lab. They couldn't keep up with production with one shop floor machine so the majority of PAFs were handwound. I don't have a difinitive answer about P90s being hand or machine wound but as they came first you can be certain that they were mostly handwound for the same reason.
seth Lover claimed that they didn't have a counter on the machines. They just wound the bobbins until they were full. Pointless stopping an auto winder to check if it's full or not; easy to stop a handwinder.

[WolfeMacleod]

If you really want to know if some of these guys are makign a decent quality pickup, why not try buying a couple for dis-assembly and examination purposes.

I have pickups from various builders who have posted here, including Duncans, Fralins, Holmes, Voodoos, Van Zandts.
Voodoo uses the longest damn pigtail leads I ever did see... And the Holmes are just works of art. Nicest component quality I ever saw, and very clean, tidy construction.
Like I said. Find out what the other people are doing, and do it better.

[Zhangliqun]

Ah, the time-honored art of industrial espionage. I'll be delving into a bit myself later this year...

[JGundry]

"Some great Fender pickups were hand wound but on the other side of it PAF's and P-90's were not hand wound and never were"

You're wrong about PAFs. Gibson had two autowinders. One on the shop floor and one in Seth Lover's lab. They couldn't keep up with production with one shop floor machine so the majority of PAFs were handwound. I don't have a difinitive answer about P90s being hand or machine wound but as they came first you can be certain that they were mostly handwound for the same reason.
seth Lover claimed that they didn't have a counter on the machines. They just wound the bobbins until they were full. Pointless stopping an auto winder to check if it's full or not; easy to stop a handwinder.

Spence you are wrong about PAF's. Read the Seymour Duncan interview with Seth Lover. He clearly says that the only hand wound PAF was the prototype he made himself. The rest were all machine wound. Duncan has one of the old machines. His does have a counter and an auto shut-off. The winder came in two variants one had an auto shut-off the other did not, both had counters. So either Gibson had both variants or they did not use the auto shut-off for some reason and just shut the machine off by hand when the counter came close to the "correct" number of turns. This would account for the variation in turns between bobbins. Perhaps the shut-off broke the magnet wire or perhaps the mercury switches that the counter tripped to apply the brake were not reliable? The winder would do 3 bobbins at one shot. Getting another winder would be the way to keep up with production not hand winding. It would be an easy equation for a factory.

[Spence]

I have read it.
I have also read the Bible.
I do not need to disect any ones else's pickups thank you.

[Zhangliqun]

Maybe we should first clarify what we mean by 'handwound'.

True handwound to me means no machine at all. You sit there and turn the wire on the bobbin with your bare hands. It's takes several hours to wind a bobbin that way so it's obviously not practical, the coil comes out "fluffy" and puts tighter limits on how much wire you can put on a bobbin. But I do know of one boutique guy who does it this way and it works extremely for him. (I made a couple that way myself that sounded great but found I was able to get that same sound or very close in other ways -- thank God!)

Anyway, my understanding of what 'handwound' means the way we kick around here is not really hand-wound so much as hand-guided. The traverse is guided by thumb and forefinger instead of some sort of automatic traverse.

That may be a DUH! moment or I may be totally wrong, but at least it's a starting point to clear some things up.

[JGundry]

I have read it.
I have also read the Bible.
I do not need to disect any ones else's pickups thank you.

I have the manual of the old winder and I have seen photos Seymour Duncan's old Gibson winder. The proof is not mythical in nature. It's really pretty straight forward.

Taking other maker's pickups apart is a useful exercise IMHO. It's an important part of learning how to wind pickups.

[David Schwab]

Maybe we should first clarify what we mean by 'handwound'.

It's like when you buy an expensive "hand knit" sweater. It wasn't knit by some elderly lady sitting there with knitting needles... it was done on a hand guided machine!

To me, hand winding is when it's not a fully automated winder, and you are feeding the wire by hand.

If on the other hand, you are just attaching bobbins and removing them after they are wound, it's a machine wound coil. That doesn't automatically make it bad though...

[Zhangliqun]

That's what I thought.

[bob p]

I suppose my gripe with these things is the dumming down of a quality product by people undervaluing their own work. Say for example this guy is really making handwound pickups and they really sound good, it makes it almost impossible for anyone to make a profit. A lot of you guys have no idea how expensive it is to make pickups here in the UK. I have looked into the cost of making a pickup like his P90 with coil tap, ebay and paypal fees and the sums don't add up.

i would have guessed that a legitimate reason for a gripe would have been that a dumming down of a quality product reduces the profit margins and makes competition more fierce. every area of the music industry has been hit by narrowing margins. its a fact of life in the economic world. people who can adapt to the situation will stay in business while those that cannot won't. that's just the reality.

i wouldn't worry too much about a small one-off winder ruining the business. he can't produce in volume and there's a limit to how much recreational winding he can do before he realizes that it won't pay his bills. then he'll start doing something else. in the big scheme of things, the process is self-limiting, as the best cure for low pickup prices is low pickup prices. after a brief shakeout, the problem will take care of itself.

now to play the devil's advocate -- i hate to sound callous, but the reality is that everyone who expects to stay in the business needs to be able to produce a quality product at a price that people are willing to pay for it. complaining about competition will fall on deaf ears. i'm in an industry where my job pays half of what it used to pay because people are willing to do it for half of what i used to make. so i had the choice of taking a 50% pay cut or getting out of the business. tragically, nobody whipped out a big teat for me to suck on when the pay cut came along. there was no consolation forthcoming because its a cruel world. if you want to rectify the situation, produce a better product than the competition and let the product do the talking. you won't have anything to worry about.

[corduroyew]

It's all fine and good to say "just make a better product" but that only goes so far. For us small time guys, 99% of the people that are exposed to our work have never heard of us and will never bother to even download our soundclips on our website. All they see is the fact that we are 2 or 3 times as expensive as idiots on ebay selling for less than it costs to make the pickup. If we have the money to hold out then we will overcome, but if we are short on cash and doing it part time, and still trying to compeat with the guy on ebay... It might not be hard for the people that already have a name, but it makes it a lot harder for the people that are developing a name for themselfs.

[Zhangliqun]

It's all fine and good to say "just make a better product" but that only goes so far. For us small time guys, 99% of the people that are exposed to our work have never heard of us and will never bother to even download our soundclips on our website.

That would be true whether E-bay even existed or not. If these cheap winders weren't around, you'd be stuck having to compete only with established players in the business, large and small, which is no day at the beach. So it's a case of name your poison.

All they see is the fact that we are 2 or 3 times as expensive as idiots on ebay selling for less than it costs to make the pickup.

If price is their only concern, they are beginners or otherwise so ignorant about pickups that they wouldn't buy from you or me under any circumstances. If there was no internet, they would just stick with the stock pu's, no matter how bad. Beginners and the tone-deaf and the terminally cheap have never been the bread-and-butter demographic for folks like us and never will be. So we've lost nothing.

If we have the money to hold out then we will overcome, but if we are short on cash and doing it part time, and still trying to compeat with the guy on ebay... It might not be hard for the people that already have a name, but it makes it a lot harder for the people that are developing a name for themselfs.

If you're doing this just part-time, it sounds like you have nothing to worry about. Actually it's the ideal situation -- you can take your time developing your product and skills without having to worry about putting food on the table. That's what sells replacement pickups and always will -- quality. As Steve Martin once said to aspiring actors and comedians: "Just be so damn good that they can't ignore you anymore."

And remember, it's not a one-way street: they have to compete with us too.

[Possum]

Ebay....

There is one thing about these Ebay guys that maybe you shouldn't fret about so much. They are building "ebay reputations." While it might be possible they might make some decent money doing that, they are still going to have a reputation for cheap work, and at some point are going to come to the realization that they aren't making any money. Well unless they are selling Chinese made stuff and using false advertising. It would be easy enough to buy one of their products and easy to tell if its a Chinese or Korean cheap product. A complaint to Ebay about false advertising will have these guys shut down if thats what any of them are doing, Ebay does have rules that they enforce. But then who's got the damn time to be the pickup police :-)