Advice on rewinding cheap pickups...

[salvarsan]

Steve Kersting's S90 is a nice sounding pickup on-the-cheap.

His T90 set sounds especially good.

[tuccisbabe]

Steve Kersting's S90 is a nice sounding pickup on-the-cheap.

Excellent tutorial! Thanks for the link, Dave. I'm definitely going to try that out. I have most of the materials already and three or more sets of those cheap ceramic strat pickups to mess with. Just need to get some screws.

Do you think the ceramic magnets that are on them already are good enough?

[Possum]

...

My first bucker sounded great and was handwound on StewMac kit stuff. The thing about machine winding is you can repeat a traverse pass pretty much perfectly every time which no human hand can do. Depending on what the turns per layer is you can get more articulation than a hand wind can IMHO. My first machine wound pickup was a P90. I love P90's so thats why I wound it first. I was never able to get a P90 to sound like a real vintage one, they were always darker no matter how I wound it with hand guiding. the first machine wound P90 nailed it to a T.

there are great handwound pickups out there, Holmes, Rolph etc. too.

Brass baseplates aren't necesserily a "bad" thing. DiMarzio uses them for a reason, not because they are cheap, or he IS cheap but designs his pickups to work with brass. Mojo's first bucker baseplates were more brassy than they are now and I really liked how they sounded and you could see in the LCR meter that the mids were being bumped up, but anyone paying $500 for a PAF repro doesn't want to see yellow baseplates, so I couldn't use them.

[Mike Sulzer]

...but anyone paying $500 for a PAF repro doesn't want to see yellow baseplates, so I couldn't use them.

Surely you are not saying that your PAF repro sounded like a PAF when using a brass base plate? The conductivity of the base plate is one thing that really does make a difference.

[Possum]

....

Oh yeah it did. As I said it had a mid-boost that was really nice. But I have since found out how to do this in other ways. This was a bridge pickup and wouldn't have been good on a neck pickup. Wasn't solid brass, just a very yellowish nickel silver...
I tried all kinds of crazy things to get the same effect, like putting a brass plate under the bobbins and magnet on top of the baseplate, didn't really work very well though...

[Dave Kerr]

Do you think the ceramic magnets that are on them already are good enough?

Yes, they do the job really well in that design.

[tonedeciple]

I once had this idea to rewind a bunch of cheap humbuckers I had planned to buy on ebay. The price for the pickups was way cheaper than I could have sourced parts at. I bought one as a test and was horrified at the quality of materials. So, I bought parts from Montreux instead.

[ShannonH]

Let's just say

that we stay on topic....

Yes, wind anything you want to. You will learn a ton. Will the results be perfect? no, but getting your hands on some wire will help you understand. If all else fails, replace all the metal parts, use the bobbins and proceed.

When I started doing this, I bought an epiphone les paul, and yanked the pickups immediately. I put in my own winds. They sounded better, brighter, more articulate. Just try it.