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Maybe this belongs in the "Painfully Obvious" or "Bad Humor" sub-forum, but here goes:
I only build & repair pickups for myself. As often as not, the projects I work on are off-the-wall one-offs that can't easily be wound on an electric winder and/or don't warrant building custom winding/counting apparatus. The first pickup I ever rewound was for an Electromuse lap steel: coil wire wound directly on a half-pound I-beam-shaped chunk of Alnico that would have become a projectile if spun at normal winding speeds without a tail stock. I've wound tiny Flatpup-style balanced mic-level single-string pickups: two coils on a 1/8" x <1/2" steel core, with a 1/8" square Neo in the middle. But enough about me.
Counting "won too tree for..." while turning a crank or winding wire directly by hand is slow, tedious, boring, prone to inaccuracy, not fun, and other bad things.
I've found that it's much easier to keep track by vocalizing a song while winding one turn per beat. Specifically, that song is Cherokee.
Cherokee is a 64-bar (vs normal 32-bar) jazz standard in AABA form. The melody moves very slowly- mostly whole and half notes. So it is easy to sing the melody while winding at a fast tempo. One time through the tune is 4 x 64 = 256 turns, probably close to what you need for a mic-level coil. Each section of the tune is 64 turns. So once thru the tune plus once more thru the head is 256 + 64 = 320.
And so on.
But, you say, "I need to wind thousands of turns". No problem. Four times thru the tune is 1024 turns. "Play" the song four times, make a hash mark, continue. It's easy to keep track of "four times thru the tune" if you pre-determine the performance order. For example, make it (1)Ensemble; (2)Alto solo; (3)Trumpet solo; (4)Ensemble. Or whatever you like. YMMV.
Here's a copy of Cherokee from The Real Book:
And here's a reference to Elmar "Flatpup" Zeilhofer's site (see last question in FAQ):
Product FAQ
-rb
I only build & repair pickups for myself. As often as not, the projects I work on are off-the-wall one-offs that can't easily be wound on an electric winder and/or don't warrant building custom winding/counting apparatus. The first pickup I ever rewound was for an Electromuse lap steel: coil wire wound directly on a half-pound I-beam-shaped chunk of Alnico that would have become a projectile if spun at normal winding speeds without a tail stock. I've wound tiny Flatpup-style balanced mic-level single-string pickups: two coils on a 1/8" x <1/2" steel core, with a 1/8" square Neo in the middle. But enough about me.
Counting "won too tree for..." while turning a crank or winding wire directly by hand is slow, tedious, boring, prone to inaccuracy, not fun, and other bad things.
I've found that it's much easier to keep track by vocalizing a song while winding one turn per beat. Specifically, that song is Cherokee.
Cherokee is a 64-bar (vs normal 32-bar) jazz standard in AABA form. The melody moves very slowly- mostly whole and half notes. So it is easy to sing the melody while winding at a fast tempo. One time through the tune is 4 x 64 = 256 turns, probably close to what you need for a mic-level coil. Each section of the tune is 64 turns. So once thru the tune plus once more thru the head is 256 + 64 = 320.
And so on.
But, you say, "I need to wind thousands of turns". No problem. Four times thru the tune is 1024 turns. "Play" the song four times, make a hash mark, continue. It's easy to keep track of "four times thru the tune" if you pre-determine the performance order. For example, make it (1)Ensemble; (2)Alto solo; (3)Trumpet solo; (4)Ensemble. Or whatever you like. YMMV.
Here's a copy of Cherokee from The Real Book:
And here's a reference to Elmar "Flatpup" Zeilhofer's site (see last question in FAQ):
Product FAQ
-rb
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