hand winders or cnc winder

[Possum]

Looks like a cool machine. The "ramping" function isn't needed though, I used to use it but don't anymore. I actually had a full design for a CNC winder and a guy lined up to build it about 7 years ago, it was going to to have a joystick for hand guided winding and a record function, he was going to charge about $3500. But meanwhile, I learned CNC on my own and ended up building what I use now. It would still be cool to have a joystick overide, but not really necessery. I think the bottom line for me was what happens if something on the winder dies? With my current winder, I can go on Ebay and find any of the parts for under $60. If I'd had that guy build the winder, I'd be out of luck if he wasn't around ten years later to build or reprogram the parts or whatever. Wolfe's expensive winder was down for probably over 6 months at one point, for example, I don't know how he recovered from that, probably went back to hand winding. I'll be curious to see what Remington comes up with. There is definitely a market for a cheaper auto winder, and it'll eventually happen, and you may see a ton of amateurs invade the market and some currently doing pickup work may be forced out of business. It'll be similar to what happened to graphic design when the Mac came out.....

[RedHouse]

Looks like a cool machine. The "ramping" function isn't needed though,....

Yeah, totally weird implementation of "ramping".

I can see ramping up the speed when you go into start mode, and down when you come into stop mode, but that stopping-n-starting at the end of each pass (layer) is really useless, and unnecessary.

Maybe his thinking was to allow some cool-down time for the steppers or something.
(or maybe Waldo or one of the 20 customers he's shipped to so far asked for that "feature")

When I was using steppers I noticed they'd get really hot.

[jason lollar]

ramping is essential for larger gauge wire where inertia is a problem particularly a problem when stopping.
"There is definitely a market for a cheaper auto winder, and it'll eventually happen, and you may see a ton of amateurs invade the market and some currently doing pickup work may be forced out of business."
Are you kidding possum? Of course you are "you may see a ton of amateurs invade the market" like that hasnt happened already?

You mean forced out of business by people undercharging what they should be getting? It wont happen, its invariably the guys not charging enough money for thier services that go out of business couple that with the fact of being inexperienced and you get alot of guys shooting themselves in the foot, we all hear horror stories about amateur service from bad repairs to... you name it. People not charging a realistic amount cant pay themselves a wage or have parts on hand or supplies or invest in new products or designs or do any R+D- seen it too many times to count. Then theres also guys that do charge enough that dont have business sense or manufacturing skills. 1000 ways to botch it really. A shop that just knocks a few items out as more of a hobby even 100 shops like that are no threat to an established shop with experience. What is it?- "rising tides lift all boats"

[Chris Turner]

Just saw a pretty interesting winder on Ebay. Looks kinda "old-school", what with the dials and such. But this could pretty easily be converted to be driven by a motor, like the seller says, with a belt: Hand Winder.

It even has a traverse.

[RedHouse]

ramping is essential for larger gauge wire where inertia is a problem particularly a problem when stopping.
"There is definitely a market for a cheaper auto winder, and it'll eventually happen, and you may see a ton of amateurs invade the market and some currently doing pickup work may be forced out of business."
Are you kidding possum? Of course you are "you may see a ton of amateurs invade the market" like that hasnt happened already?

You mean forced out of business by people undercharging what they should be getting? It wont happen, its invariably the guys not charging enough money for thier services that go out of business couple that with the fact of being inexperienced and you get alot of guys shooting themselves in the foot, we all hear horror stories about amateur service from bad repairs to... you name it. People not charging a realistic amount cant pay themselves a wage or have parts on hand or supplies or invest in new products or designs or do any R+D- seen it too many times to count. Then theres also guys that do charge enough that dont have business sense or manufacturing skills. 1000 ways to botch it really. A shop that just knocks a few items out as more of a hobby even 100 shops like that are no threat to an established shop with experience. What is it?- "rising tides lift all boats"

Ouch.

[David Schwab]

You mean forced out of business by people undercharging what they should be getting?

Plus there is the perceived value factor. If you undercharge for a product, it is perceived as poor quality. It's the old you get what you pay for. People know quality is not cheap. You can also over-price yourself out of a market, but that hasn't hurt builders like Alembic any!

[JGundry]

Plus there is the perceived value factor. If you undercharge for a product, it is perceived as poor quality. It's the old you get what you pay for. People know quality is not cheap. You can also over-price yourself out of a market, but that hasn't hurt builders like Alembic any!

I have run my own business for nearly 20 years now and there seem to be a few constants no matter what business people are in. One is there are always going to be businesses that think they can defy financial gravity by undercharging. The other constant is most good information goes completely ignored.

[RedHouse]

...there are always going to be businesses that think they can defy financial gravity by undercharging...

With the only (seeming) exception being Guitar Center - Musicians Friend, who has managed to undercharge long enough to drive away most of the local competition. And now that they have their prices have bumped back up to where others used to sell stuff.
(not to mention that stupid "list" thing they do instead of the Memorial & Labor Day sales they used to have)

But then I would suppose being able to get your suppliers to drop their other outlets in your favor goes a long way too.
(ie; the Gibson Faux Pas)

[RedHouse]

Plus there is the perceived value factor. If you undercharge for a product, it is perceived as poor quality. It's the old you get what you pay for. People know quality is not cheap. You can also over-price yourself out of a market, but that hasn't hurt builders like Alembic any!

Not to argue (and I'm not), ...but there is that "Guitar Center mentality" getting more and more prevalent these days.

For an example just this week I had a guy inquiring about a Vibe-Baby, balk at the price, and tell me "I can get an xxxx at Guitar Center for less that that" and of course I replied "and you probably should". People are getting used to GC/MF selling at rock bottom prices and expecting small businesses to do likewise. I had to explain to one (youngster?) recently that I can't (and don't) compete with stuff like "Duncan Designed" pickups, he wanted me to sell him one of mine at the same price he could get a DD from GC/MF, sheesh!.

[Possum]

Well the truth is that the guys who undercharge are producing a mediocre product to begin with, they tend to sell alot of product too because they are cheap and fast and slightly better than the factory products, though they are all using the same vendor parts. I get guys all the time tell me about some Ebay pickups they bought from some hand winder and are astonished that when they bought mine how huge a difference there is, though on the outside they look basically the same, Strat pickups a good example of that. Eventually some players figure out that cheap boutique pickups aren't all that good. Those guys though, tend to be here today and gone tomorrow, they never get any better and finally figure out its hard work....

I disagree, Jason. If someone comes out with an affordable or maybe not so affordable automatic winder, with implemented programs that will, say, have a menu for "PAF, Strat, Telecaster bridge, P90, etc. etc." already programmed into it, it WILL sell and it will have a noticeable and progressive impact on the boutique pickup business (tho I hate that stupid name). If you had told me back in '78, that in a few years, a little lunchbox sized computer would destroy every typesetting business in the world, would obsolete megamillion dollar photo retouching computer systems, allow anyone to do their own airbrush photo retouching, and put together four color ad and brochure design, ready for printing presses to run on press, I would have said you were totally crazy. Those changes happened nearly overnite. Well, it happened, and wanna-be "designers" came out of the woodwork, undercut professional pricing and pretty much flattened the field of graphic design, and brought the high level of design standards in that field down to a tragic level of mediocrity. Its never really recovered and the golden age of super star graphic designers is long gone, current generations don't even know those guy's names. You could be more right than not, but I wouldn't putting money on a bet like that. There may not be a big enough market for a machine like that, but I wouldn't bet on that either. If this guy's little CNC winder sells well, someone is going to notice, and you got Remington looking into doing a targeted pickup winding machine too, the signs are there.

[jason lollar]

well D man technology is generally good but let me qualify my statement, we still disagree but I can say you have a point if you are talking about people that only make a very limited selection of pickups- some people only make humbuckers!!!! Good lord. Write those people off in my world and yours.
Anyway your example of the printing industry, I went back to college in the early 90s to take more drafting and possibly get a degree which I didn’t finish and we spent months learning how to make blueprints which involves drawing a perfect line in lead pencil, you have to lay down a certain amount of lead with a particular amount of pressure and keep the overall drawing free of excess lead or the blue print wont come out with consistant line weights. We also spent a lot of time using pen and ink which is really hard too.
So as soon as I left- in came the computer, now you dont need to know the old ways- cut and paste use to mean you actually cut out a piece of graphic and pasted it on to a board and photographed it to make a printed page= now cut and paste is just a computer command no one knows what it means
so did all these drafstmen go out of business? Only if they didnt either keep ahead of the new technology or they didnt have something special to offer. Sometimes drawing by hand is faster than with a computer- look at pro tools, talking about screwing off hours and hours if you let yourself .
Just because you have a computerized winder- let say it has something equivalent to pro tools on it. An auto winder cant go faster than a handwinder if the handwinder is any good and dont bullshit me about that. BUTTTT You can set it up to wind more than one bobbin at a time - dream on- that would take an incredible amount of experience to get any consistency and it would be a hair pulling experience anyways. Name one guy you know that does that with any regularity.
Its like the Korean pickup makers, they can make a pickup but they don’t get it.
OK lets say all these guys have pre programmed winders- where do they get the information to know what they are doing or why they are doing it?
Don’t be scared, be ahead of everyone. Maybe we will have to change some things to keep ahead but anyone making pickups no one else makes is going to have a completely different customer base
OK here would you hire junior kimbrough for 2000 dollars or hire a guy that copies jr kimbrough for 800? Its different
I say keep ahead of the pack and don’t rest on your laurels, that’s why I make stuff no one else does and when people bother to ask I probably have 100 pickup designs I can reproduce I don’t advertise not counting the several pickups I nmake every week that are one of a kind never made before. Just because you have a winder doesnt mean anything AND then there is application- what do I need to fit this into a les paul signature, how many of thesze guys know that?
Im just saying don’t be a pussy- go out and kick some ass 

[jason lollar]

oh D man- even though you are a crotchdy old @#$# I still know him well - probably ten years??? I dont have a personal beef and would love to see DS if I stay in portland sometime rather than just driving through as I usually do. D man you are a trip ha ha

[Possum]

Well yeah, Jason you are a good friend and put up with the fourteen million questions I asked you when you were helping me through your book, I owe you more than I could even count ;-) I always tell beginners to get your book and learn to make stuff from scratch like your book teaches, or just be another StewMac junkie winder ;-) Crotchety, yeah, kinda always have been, low BS tolerance for sure.

Well, then you saw how fast computers changed things too. When I trained as a graphic designer I went to school and got an AS degree and apprenticed at the same time, and was the only guy in my class who ever got a job in graphic design. You had to actually be able to draw and hand letter to begin with too. In the beginning, computers were a god-send for designers, because it let us set our own type, and make press-ready film ourselves. But, no, not everyone made the transition. One of my design mentors, an extremely talented lady, couldn't make the jump because computers were pricey, the color Macs were. EMG actually paid for my color Mac system to do my work for them as a loan and I paid it off in work. The ones who didn't make the jump had a real bad time of it, some caught on years later, some just disappeared down some hole.

I totally agree and have always said that having an auto winder is useless unless you have maybe five years of hand winding under your belt and understand how to design an original pickup from scratch, understand all the principles involved and don't rely on kit parts that are already designed for you. I think its also a smart idea to build your own CNC winder from scratch like I did so you understand how that stuff works, and once you do you're more liable to make something stupid simple like mine is that doesn't put limits on what you can do. For instance, my traverse isn't connected at all to the Adams Maxwell winder, and I can move it closer or further away to the pickup, or even rotate it as a cheap fast way to center the path if its off a hair.

Now, all that said.......if I had some whiz kid CNC designer as a partner (being devil's advocate here and looking into probable futures...), I could imagine a simple, cheap, CNC self contained winder, that would have presets for all the typical pickups, hand wind patterns, and machine patterns for PAF's etc. Have it all built in plastic and maybe even just cheap servo motors instead of CNC stepper motors. Then have simple manual overides if someone wanted to mess with things on their own. Will it happen? I wouldn't say "never," I'd say someone eventually may try it. StewMac I'm sure sells enough small rolls of magnet wire and kit pickup parts, to be an indicator that there's a market out there, how big, I don't know. Have you ever seen those Cricket vinyl film cutters for hobbyists? Never thought I'd see anything like that, and there's similar things for woodworking that cuts designs into wood. I can just see something like that appearing, and the people buying them thinking they are instant pickup geniuses and selling that stuff to the public. If the programs were written by someone knowledgeable and the instructions were done right, a machine like that could turn out product at least as good as what the average hobby business is doing.

I don't know if I'm going to stick with this business or not, my waiting list is way too long, and I lose business because of that. I've got the niche of PAF replicator right in the pocket and I know that stuff way beyond what some want to believe. I've hit as far as I can with it though, so its time to turn to other designs and ideas and do something original. If I get out of the biz there'll be a book on what I learned about PAF's and other pickups and techniques. Already writing this stuff down in that event. I don't think I want to hire someone to help, which is probably the only way to move the business forward, it scares me to think that some kid could also destroy my business because I couldn't watch everything he did and so pickups going out could be screwed up in ways that I couldn't check on. TVJ also warned me that a kid like that could stick around a year and then take everything he learned here steal all your secrets and become a competitor in a bad way. Look what happened to Barden too, man did hever get f*cked bad by the guys he hired; yeah he came back but his rep was lost in the interim....

We're not actually in Portland, we're about 45 minutes outside of there, in a town that has zero interest, you could crash here a night or two if needed, we have a nice guest room, right now we're putting in new wood flooring, so its all a mess and its not my income that's paying for it, sad to say.....

[Possum]

PS....Yeah I agree on the winding multiple bobbins at the same time deal. I fuss enough over just one coil and can't imagine turning out a quality wind if I had to keep track of tension etc. on more than that ;-) I am constantly checking things as a bobbin is being wound, it really has to be done right, or it gets cut off and one over again. Some day "Korean tone" might be a big deal, LOL ;-)

[RedHouse]

Ahhh, having an "Oprah" moment here.