Help me design single pole piece coil?

[zionstrat]

Hello, I've wound many conventional pickups and am now considering a different approach... I would like to make a strat like pickup where every pole piece is a separate coil, connect them in series and end up with approximately the same impedience as a conventional coil.

I'm guessing others may have tried this before, so I would appreciate ideas and links to similar threads.

I could also use some help with basic math because I may have something fundamentally wrong from the start. Measuring the amount of wire in a turn, I estimated that it would take 6262 turns around each of the 6 pole pieces to equal the amount of wire in an average strat coil of 8350 turns.

This seems so high and potentially bulky that I hope I'm way off in my thinking...

Feel free to to shoot the entire idea down and open to your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

[big_teee]

Here, you can just buy a set.
https://lawingmusicalproducts.com/zexcoil-strat/
T

[Antigua]

Hello, I've wound many conventional pickups and am now considering a different approach... I would like to make a strat like pickup where every pole piece is a separate coil, connect them in series and end up with approximately the same impedience as a conventional coil.

I'm guessing others may have tried this before, so I would appreciate ideas and links to similar threads.

I could also use some help with basic math because I may have something fundamentally wrong from the start. Measuring the amount of wire in a turn, I estimated that it would take 6262 turns around each of the 6 pole pieces to equal the amount of wire in an average strat coil of 8350 turns.

This seems so high and potentially bulky that I hope I'm way off in my thinking...

Feel free to to shoot the entire idea down and open to your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

I think the main issue with doing this would be accounting for the series inductance. Inductance adds together, a Strat pickup has about 2.4H inductance, so if you have six little pole pieces in series, each would need an inductance of 400mH per pole piece to add up to 2.4H with six of them in series. A Strat pickup achieves that ~2.4H inductance with about 8,000 turns or so, so it would presumably take far fewer turns per pole piece to achieve only 400mH per pole piece, especially since the core would be solid. Suppose you only need a thousand turns of wire, I wonder how much voltage output you'd achieve per each pole piece, compared to a regular pickup, with that smaller number of turns. If the Zexcoil is set up with all of its pole piece coils in series, it must be sufficient. Also, I would not the ground the individual pole pieces, in order to avoid capacitance between the pole pieces and the coils, since the coils and cores will be so close together.

A member on here named Mike Sulzer has made one-coil-per-string prototypes using ferrite cores. Hopefully he will stop by and comment.

[zionstrat]

Thanks for feedback guys!

Yes, if I could buy the Zexcoil parts, I would save a lot of time, but I dont think they sell the parts and I expect they would be expensive if they did.

What I am trying to do is rather simple- I want to combine elements of what we would think of as a traditional pickup- For example, combine the E+B polepieces from the neck pup with the G+D from the mid with the E+A from the bridge-

If that does what I imagine it will do (clear articulate bass with warm sustaining treble), there's 100 other things I imagine doing with these coils.

So I would really appreciate input from Mike and anyone else that has started down this road-

Thanks again,
Mickey

[zionstrat]

Also, inductance makes far more sense as it refects so much more than length and gage of wire... Thanks again.

[Antigua]

If you're willing to suffer the limitation of three pole pieces to two coils, you can buy a set of three Fender Super 55's and repurpose them with four lead wires for individual switching. If you charge all six pole pieces to a common polarity with a neodymium, you will lose the humbucking possibilities of that pickup, but you'd also avoid the "dead spot" in the middle that probably accounts for why this pickup set goes for as cheap as it does.

I took a look at the Zexcoil platform, and it appears that it also contains two groups in series, each with three coils in series, but it looks like a single solder point joins each of the individual coils, so I think it might rather difficult to attach individual leads to the individual coils, so you'd be stuck with just the two groups of three, same as the Super 55's.

[zionstrat]

Thanks Antigua! Great 'out of the box' thinking-

If you're willing to suffer the limitation of three pole pieces to two coils, you can buy a set of three Fender Super 55's

I was imagining pairs of 2 polepieces for a couple of reasons
1. Easy to do RWRP so that any pair is hum free in any combination
2. From a switching POV, I imagine it far more likely that I might want to move from warm to bright with EBGD or just move EB, where 3 coils together would force all treble strings or all bass strings to move together?

I get the idea that there's more connections going on with pairs (switching 3 pairs per pickup instead of 2 trios), but not clear if I'm missing a bigger concept?

Will do some Super 55 research to see if I'm thinking clearly.

[Chris Turner]

I've made some Wal-type individual coil pickups for bass, similar to what you've described here.

For bobbins, I bought some round core transformer bobbins from here: Cosmo Corporation - Coil Bobbin Catalog Search By Bobbin Type

[David Schwab]

I've made some Jazz Bass pickups like this. They were very loud and bright! I used the standard 2 magnets per string setup.