Butyrate bobbin shoot out--Bang!

[automan]

Possum + Gundry = total entertainment

[frankfalbo]

Yeah now this is what I call a shoot out! LOL. Alright everybody calm down...

John: I don't think I invited a comparison, but no big deal. I only meant to defend your bobbin's string spacing variance between screw and slug. If part of promoting your bobbin includes drawing contrasts with other bobbins out there, including ours, by all means do so, that is fair.

Dave: I don't think I flipped out, and I tried to take the focus off of you in particular. The issue is this: The easiest jab you can throw at the "biggest" of something in your product class is that they cheap out, or they mass produce, or they're just not the same as they used to be when they were smaller. With Seymour, none of those claims hold water. There's no CBS/Norlin equivalent in our timeline.

I don't want you guys to feel like you can never say anything negative about Seymour Duncan just because I might be hanging around. If I answer, you know it will be legit, because I'm not some marketing firm hired to protect the brand. I'm just me, and I work here so I know first-hand.

So Duncans aren't interested in saving money

Sure, but not in sacrificing our values. If you sold 10,000 pickups, you'd probably buy a cool screwdriver to load screws too. Well, we have 10 of them, all with non-rotating finders. (though we don't have Gibson's auto loader that loads 6 at a time with no human contact) We sell enough pickups to make our own custom tooling, machines, and fixtures to increase efficiency. We probably get to deal with some vendors that won't deal with smaller builders due to quantity constraints. So we get to negotiate pricing with them based on our quantities. Those all represent "saving money" but not in a way that gives anything up. (pure savings, no compromise) We can also run a really smooth operation because of our quantity. Someone is pigtailing at a work station designed for that, with everything they need at their fingertips, working in batches of 20-50 at a time. There's not a lot of reaching or getting up to go find something. The warehouse keeps the production floor stocked on a kanban system. It's all pretty awesome to see, and yet it all is meant to support the hand building process. It's like we've automated and improved everything around the hand building process, but protected the hand building itself.

Anyway sorry for the rant. Back to the bobbins, I do see the color difference in the black. I'm not sure what that's all about. Maybe we have the black spec'd to color match our polycarbonate black so that if someone has one of each in the same guitar, they match visually. Its interesting though.

As for Butyrate actually affecting the tone, I am willing to say this: If you made a humbucker with rubber bobbins it would change the tone, yes? The inner layers would press their way into the material, and the overall coil would give way under tension, so that higher winding tension would not equal higher "wound" tension, because the coil would relax a little. Although a rubber bobbin is obsurd, one has to conclude that softness of the material has some affect on the coil. Whether you choose to believe it is audible is up to the individual. Maybe a little more tension on Butyrate is like a little less tension on Polycarbonate. Maybe it's like a wider traverse because the last layer of wire presses in on each side a little. Maybe neither...

[JGundry]

Now we know that the airgap is made against shriking sinks.That is a fact.

I am not willing to believe that it is made to save butyrate or ABS .

How much is a pair of PAF clone bobbins worth for the small pickup winder if it would be available ?
An how much weight has the PAF Clone bobbin as a marketing tool ?

Many winders showed up with those clone bobbins in the past month and I am shure they will be on sale sooner or later for all of us.

There is a very large waste tab that you have to break off the bobbins. The waste alone is enough to make a bobbin. The hollow center is to avoid sink. The All Parts bobbins do not even have a solid center. They have voids you can see from the bottom side.

Other than Belwar and me I can think of only 2 or 3 other small makers that actually paid to have the tooling done. I'm sure all of them intend to make fairly accurate PAF bobbin repros but they all look different. It is a lot of time and headache to do it. There are already some super cheap Korean pickups that use Butyrate. So from a marketing standpoint Butyrate alone means very little. It is just one more detail for a PAF clone maker to get right.

[Electricdaveyboy]

Yes ,
I been talking about PAF Clone bobbins made of CAB.
But what is just another year of wait or two or more...
I am shure most of us would use them (PAF C. B. m. o. CAB) if we could buy them.Even those who say `it´ woun´t matter ........
Pickups making is adiction.

[JGundry]

John: I don't think I invited a comparison, but no big deal. I only meant to defend your bobbin's string spacing variance between screw and slug. If part of promoting your bobbin includes drawing contrasts with other bobbins out there, including ours, by all means do so, that is fair.

Of course comparative advertising is totally legit. But I'm really not interested in drawing a direct comparison with anyone explicitly. I only felt the need to correct your assertion that Seth Lover Bobbins are closer to what you would see in an original PAF which is just not the case. My posts here were not even meant as promotion. I have not even posted on my site yet that I am using Butyrate bobbins.

[Possum]

...

Frank, seems like you calmed down and realized I wasn't insulting anyone. Jon, for now we are putting off the CAB bobbins, they just simply aren't that important, I've already been getting what I wanted and have been using correct spec bobbins for about 4 years, thats all that matters, but its not the most important thing by far. I may do something on my own and make them myself out of CAB in my own shop, there are inexpensive ways of doing this. Getting the right grade of CAB is important as Frank mentions its softer than ABS, but I think it was you that said there are harder grades. Its only important to know that; having them made isn't going to put you over the threshold. The drawings are real and were a gift and will never be shared, sorry. They only show the original plan and differ from what was actually produced and don't show how the actual bobbins changed through the years, still for me its like having the plans for the original Ark Having done hundreds of experiments on bucker bobbin design, it was great to see these because it shows me exactly what tone they were intending.

I certainly don't feel threatened by anyone from Duncan being here and welcome the knowledge input, a big company can't match what an individual business does and vice versa, there's no conflict there. Back to the bobbins. I think most of the winders here if given PAF spec butyrate bobbins would probably hate them They really aren't what you think they are, you can't put nearly as much wire on them as a StewMac bobbin will take and they darken up fast....

[JGundry]

Butyrate is important for an accurate PAF style pickup. No way around that.
Also for me having my own parts sources is important. My goal is to have every part custom made in the USA. Once the baseplates are done then everything is USA made for my humbuckers. I would rather pay more for USA made and have a reliable parts source with the specs. I want. Considering the vintage winding capabilities I have, taking these extra steps makes complete sense. For someone else it may seem like an extravagance and maybe it would be.

[David Schwab]

I don't want you guys to feel like you can never say anything negative about Seymour Duncan just because I might be hanging around.

I like Seymour and his pickups. I never met the guy, but back in the 70's when he was doing rewinding, before his own pickups appeared, I sent him a letter about having my Rick 4001 pickups rewound. I had the letter I got back from him for a long time and then I lost it sometime in the late 80's.

A funny thing about that was I asked if he could make a stacked humbucker out of my long magnet toaster neck pickup. I got the idea from the old LP recording pickups. Seymour said that wouldn't work, and then in the 80's he came out with his stacked pickups.... I like to think I got him thinking about the idea... lol See that Seymour? It did work.

[Possum]

...

Well, I'll tell ya, in all the years I've been selling well researched and replicated PAF sets not ONE person has asked what kind of plastic I'm using :-)
CAB plastic is practically at the bottom of the list as far as the technical reasons PAF's sound the way they do. Their one contribution to the tone is easily done with ABS bobbins if you've taken enough of them apart to know what's happening. The only importance that plastic has to anyone is in MARKETING value, and you don't really notice Duncan making up myths about their "special" plastic and they don't tout their Leesona as having mystical powers. Guitar players don't care, pickup makers care because its a traditional material. Zip to do with the tone. You CAN get there with ABS because I"m doing it. Steel is THE most important ingredient, you have to get that right and the steel parts have to be the exact dimensions. I have a pretty complete metallurgical history of Gibson steel parts from the earliesst P90's up and through late TTops. There is a linear progression there that is way worth anyone's study than what kind of plastic bobbin is made of. Probably the last 3 years of my work has been focused on steel alone. I probably will set up my own CAB bobbins this year and do them myself, but you wont see making special claims for something thats really not there.

[JGundry]

I will be truly impressed if you are able to make anything that approaches a real PAF bobbin with one off acetone dissolved, hand made bobbins. Those were for one off prototypes and I think you would have to glue the flanges on and slugs etc..

[Possum]

....

Thats not what I do nor plan to do.

[JGundry]

All I know is Belwar and I were extremely lucky to get 100lbs. of it. The usual buy is 1200lbs. Also the ratio of colored mix to plastic is tiny. I think you would really have to have an injection molding machine to mix the color well enough. The butyrate comes in either clear or natural and then you mix in the color. When you look in the bucket that has the plastic mixed with the color you think there is no way it will come out the correct color because there is so little color in the mix.

You could probably figure out how to mix CAB from scratch but coloring beyond a basic black seems like hours of research that could end poorly.

If you are going to do injection molding yourself I got to see that so please take pictures.

[Possum]

...

Here is what I plan on doing

[JGundry]

Hand made acetate prototype bobbin. Acetone dissolved goo forced into mold and acetone evaporates. Seth Lover mentions it for prototypes in the Duncan interview. You could make one out of acetate binding but it would be acetate.

I must say the pickup in that photo seems suspicious and probably bogus to me. It falls a little bit into the too good to be true category. Also the wear makes no sense. But the fact that there is no bullseye on the slugs seems odd. Gibson was using bullseye cut-off slugs in lap steel pickups way before they were making prototype P-90's. Is there a good photo under the cover of Seth Lover's prototype PAF?

One more suspicious detail with that guitar with the "prototype" PAF's. Why are there 8 mounting holes for two different sized pickup rings on the neck pickup cavity?

Wait a minute. Those bobbins are not even acetate prototypes. They are cut down and drilled out P-90 bobbins. You think?

[belwar]

Wow the inside of Seymours (Seth's) first PAF?

Its never really occured to me about the insides of that pickup. From the little I know about Seymour the man himself, my gut says he wouldnt pop the cover. I mean he knew the man who made it! he probably just asked "whats in here?". Really what could be learned by looking inside it? it's both a PAF and its not. It's an immense piece of history.

On the first of the three or so times i've visited the Seymour Duncan shop (I dont think the term factory is really correct), it wasnt the Leesona, or the Gorman 2+2, or Evan, or Frank, or even Seymour himself that sticks out in my mind.. It is a little glass case that sits nondescriptly in the corner beside the front door. At the time I remember thinking to myself about the respect that was being given not only to THIER history, but pickup making as a whole.

Ok, thats partially true... I also remember everyone in the factory dancing. That was wierd.