Whatcha doin?

[JoshG]

For those of you that are doing this for a living, what have you been up to?

Me- In the last week I've rewound 2 Kay "speed bump" pickups and overhauled the electronics in the bass they were in, repaired a paper bobbin pickup with a broken coil and replaced the magnets to help resurrect an old Teisco T-Bird copy, rewound a Silvertone/Danelectro Lipstick bass pickup, rewound some funky single coil pickups out of a Dixon 335 copy, rewound a Hofner Club bass pickup (neck pos) and replaced the pots, built/spun up 3 sets of AL5 Strat pickups, built a Tele bridge pickup based on a '51 Broadcaster I had my hands on a few years back, built/spun up a set of J bass pickups for a customer who wanted the neck to sound more like a P bass and the bridge to sound like Jaco (to quote Borat- "great success!"), and wound up 2 sets of P bass pickups one to "vintage" specs and the other to paintpeeling-raftershaking-facemelting specs. Lots of fun!

How 'bout you?

[David King]

JoshG,
I think I mentioned to you that most of us don't actually wind anything, we just talk about it.
I have a 5 string MIM J bass in that someone stuck emgs in that are way too short. I haven't delved into it very far yet. It might just work.
I also need to wire up on of my basses that has a dual buffer preamp and my dual coil pickups. It needs to have full passive controls so I need to build some custom, dual ganged pots to handle the buffered and the passive volume and treble boost/ tone under each knob. Then there's a 4 pole active passive switch to jump everything over. I've been having nightmares for weeks about tackling that job.
I had to rewire on old bass that had too many things going on (onboard electronic tuner, headphones amp with aux input, active two band preamp). It had 3 push-pull switch pots and 3 switching jacks. I seem to be the end of the line for wiring no one else wants to tackle.
How many turns did you end up putting on the lipstick rewind?

[StarryNight]

Josh, you should be blogging your work man. It sounds like you get some interesting jobs coming through your shop. Lately I've been photographing all my jobs and it's a great way to archive specs of vintage pickups, have a photo library of cool vintage guitars, share stories on this forum with illustration , and have a portfolio of past jobs. If you don't want a website or blog, Facebook is a good place to start a page and upload photos showing your work. It's actually pretty fun.

[JoshG]

David- you'll have a far better shot at getting all that wiring craziness together than I would, that's for certain. I bet that dual buffered passive quad thrusters with the 4 pole active jumper will sound killer! Seriously though: I'm sure if anyone's qualified to figure that out, it's you. And...I find it hard to believe that the "most of you" are just hanging around, geeking out with each other, and not getting your hands dirty! As for the tube, while I usually take good notes, I didn't on that one. To the best of my memory it was a little below 6000, 42pe, with a low/mid 4 dcr. It was my first attempt at a coil like that- a challenge, for sure. I told the customer that I was going to do a little more experimenting with it and when I came up with something excellent I'd rewind his for free. He was very happy with the work, but I know I can do even better. Practice makes perfect right? I'll make sure to share all the juicy details on the prototypes I put together and spin up.

Starry- I love taking photos of the stuff I'm working on...it's a blast! And I agree that pictures and detailed notes (measurements, diagrams, thoughts, etc.) are an awesome way to keep track of everything and what you've learned along the way. I make an effort to do this with every project, but sometimes I get a head full of steam and just dive right in, camera and notebook be damned, and knock it out! There have been a few times where I wish I would've written it all down and snapped a few pics of the important bits...ah well. A Photobucket or Flickr account at the very least would be a good move- and make it easy to share too.