Laminated Blades

[Possum]

Laminated blades are fun but not fun to MAKE. I make a Tele neck pickup that has the sound of angel harps, amazing tone, but making them is totally from hell ;-) McMaster shim stock is the way to go, you have to experiment. The problem I ran into is how to laminate non-conductive material between the shim stock and have it come out as a single width every time. You are making a "sandwich" of material and using your choice of adhesive to unify it all together and its difficult to get even pressure over the whole length of the blade. This is not a new idea (is there really ANY new ideas in pickups?), and laminated pickups were made in the 70's. I got so sick of making these things I jacked the price up to cover my actual time and sales disappeared on that item (YES!!!!). What it actually does is eliminate the typical boomy tones of blade pickups, especially in the bass end of things. Probably what I made in my blades may actually be unique from what others have tried, but if you're just making them for yourself they are worth experimenting with....

[David Schwab]

I was gluing paper between the lams with CA. Now I use thin double stick tape, the kind you use for woodworking.

[big_teee]

so how thick of metal is used to make the laminated blades?
Sounds like a lot of work.
Does it make that much difference in sound?
T

[David Schwab]

so how thick of metal is used to make the laminated blades?
Sounds like a lot of work.
Does it make that much difference in sound?
T

That depends. You can use very thin metal and a lot of lams, but sometimes I just use two to four lams. It brightens the tone. If you read some of the threads on eddy currents you will see that they tend to flatten the resonant peak. I had one design that was using laminated stainless steel blades, it was too harsh sounding, so I went with a single thin low carbon steel blade to knock some of the mids down and warm up the tone.

If you break away from the whole Gibson/Fender design constrictions (slugs, screws, rods), you can use the pole material and construction to get different tones. One beauty of using blades is that they can be very thin, which would not work with a round pole, unless you didn't mind not being able to bend strings!

[big_teee]

That depends. You can use very thin metal and a lot of lams, but sometimes I just use two to four lams. It brightens the tone. If you read some of the threads on eddy currents you will see that they tend to flatten the resonant peak. I had one design that was using laminated stainless steel blades, it was too harsh sounding, so I went with a single thin low carbon steel blade to knock some of the mids down and warm up the tone.

If you break away from the whole Gibson/Fender design constrictions (slugs, screws, rods), you can use the pole material and construction to get different tones. One beauty of using blades is that they can be very thin, which would not work with a round pole, unless you didn't mind not being able to bend strings!

I like the blade pickup sound.
I have showed them to everybody that will look at them.
So far, No one will buy them.
If it is a fender they want single coils that hum.
So for now looks like I'm through making them cause no one will buy them.
T

[David Schwab]

I like the blade pickup sound.
I have showed them to everybody that will look at them.
So far, No one will buy them.
If it is a fender they want single coils that hum.
So for now looks like I'm through making them cause no one will buy them.
T

I guess you have to find a different market. I stayed out of guitar pickups for a long time because of this. But I have a lot of customers when I do repairs and stuff that use the Duncan and DiMarzio rail pickups in their Fenders, so there is a market out there.

[big_teee]

I guess you have to find a different market. I stayed out of guitar pickups for a long time because of this. But I have a lot of customers when I do repairs and stuff that use the Duncan and DiMarzio rail pickups in their Fenders, so there is a market out there.

It's guitar players, and my area.
I guess we are living in the past 20-40 years.
I rigged up a test strat with blades and left it at a guitar store.
Everyone that plays it loves the sound of the blades then they buy a set of single coils.
But, I do like the no hum concept.
I have them in my strat that I play in my bedroom because of my bad hum there.
I play next to my metal desk with dsl modem, wireless modem, telephone, and have a ceiling fan near by with 4 twisty fluorescents.
The blades are much quieter than my les paul.
So, I'm sold, if I can get some other folks to come around.
Thanks,
T

[David Schwab]

It's guitar players, and my area.

Sell them on the internet! There's lots of players out there.

Every now and then I get someone local, but most of my sales are online.

[Possum]

Put them on Ebay, someone will buy them. Kinman and Barden and Lawrence (the Godfather of hum free blade pickups) all do good business. there is a niche of techy guitar players out there who like that stuff; I bought Lawrence's stuff way back when and liked it, but you need a pedal with those things. Its true that most guitar players are very traditionally conservative, but those old designs are timeless and they work well if you study actual examples of what was made back then. I had EMG as a client back in the 80's and though it was good stuff if you used their add-on tone circuits and booster, one day I picked up a friend's traditional strat with stupid single coils and after two minutes of playing it I threw my EMG's in the trash the next day, you just cannot beat the simple richness of simple traditional noisy single coils, love the HUM!

[big_teee]

Put them on Ebay, someone will buy them. Kinman and Barden and Lawrence (the Godfather of hum free blade pickups) all do good business. there is a niche of techy guitar players out there who like that stuff; I bought Lawrence's stuff way back when and liked it, but you need a pedal with those things. Its true that most guitar players are very traditionally conservative, but those old designs are timeless and they work well if you study actual examples of what was made back then. I had EMG as a client back in the 80's and though it was good stuff if you used their add-on tone circuits and booster, one day I picked up a friend's traditional strat with stupid single coils and after two minutes of playing it I threw my EMG's in the trash the next day, you just cannot beat the simple richness of simple traditional noisy single coils, love the HUM!

I don't love the hum.
I'm not going to put up with the hum.
There are too many fine Hum free Pickups to tolerate the hum.
The single coils don't sound any better, they just make more racket!
T

[Joe Gwinn]

I thought so too, but I found her on some other forums actually saying other things. But she has posted that exact sentence in other threads.

Even if human, she's a bot.

[Joe Gwinn]

I was gluing paper between the lams with CA. Now I use thin double stick tape, the kind you use for woodworking.

The voltage between lamina is in the millivolts, so any kind of insulation layer will work, even a paint film. Mechanical strength is the issue, to survive assembly and winding.

I would use epoxy-soaked onion skin paper (or very thin mylar), cured in a metal fixture that can apply adequate uniform pressure to the stack. The fixture will require waxed steel cauls.

What would also work is dipping individual lamina in thinned epoxy varnish and curing before assembly of lamina into a blade pole.

The best epoxies must be cured at 250 F.

[David King]

If only there were a way to cut the pre-laminated steel into the blade shapes without messing up the insulating layers. Perhaps you could work with continuos rolls of steel strapping tape of the correct width and then chop them off at the right length without delaminating them or causing a short internally.

[SpareRibs]

Hello,
I am probably going to make a fixture, form the blades, and then laminate them with core dope. Using the recycled material will eliminate the waste of premium priced steel in the development stage.
I think there are a lot of areas meriting further exploration into blade type pickups. It just may be that someday people will fall off that, pole piece, screw, mounted on a magnet, dinosaur. Maybe it would help if I could work out a way to stagger the blades???

[Possum]

All hum cancelling pickups sacrifice the full range of available sounds in a pickup to kill the hum. But, then none of them are really dead silent, well maybe EMG's or such? So there is a trade off you pay for. The hum gets cancelled but so does alot of other stuff. Then, too to get two coils into a space normally reserved for one coil, you're usually forced to use thinner wire, so right there you're losing more nice juicy stuff a noisy single coil has. I played Lawrence's and EMG's Strat pickups for years, but in the end its the noisy pickups that are the most juicy soul satisfying single coil style pickups for me. Now, if you're playing heavy metal with tons of distortion it probably doesn't make any difference because heavy distortion makes everything sound the same, its more the amp than the pickups making the sounds (or pedal board etc.) But for clean blues playing thru a vintage hand wired cranked up to just a little break-up, something like a DiMarzio noiseless single coils sounds flat and bland, lifeless, alot of it has to do with the very thin magnet wire being used. I think if you want noiseless and want to keep the character in your pickups the Suhr system they license from that Russian guy is the way to go, you can use your regular strat pickups, and tune the device to them, losing very little in the process. Still, I've known a few who didn't like it at all....

You can cut laminated blade stock and not short the layers out but probably only if you're making your own laminated stock. I make my blades oversize then cut down on a metal band saw, then disk sand the edges then hand sand the edges, and no problems with shorts. I did look for laminated blade pre-made material and couldn't really find anything to use. Maybe its why the laminated pickups of the 70's disappeared into history.