Does hand winding mean hand on the wire?

[R.G.]

You'll probably think this is a terrible newbie question, but it's been puzzling me for ages. The bobbin of a pickup is a long, thin oblong, so wire will wind onto it in jerks. How do you wind it at speed without snapping the wire, especially since a big spool has inertia so the wire will want to come off smoothly?

Back when I was posting speculative designs here, I found an approximate mathematical description of the velocity of the wire as it goes onto a long thin bobbin. It's pretty much a distorted full wave rectified sine. You can't let the spool intertia be involved, so all thin wires come off the end of the spool.

If you have a good tensioner - that is, it approximates pure viscous drag of a single value - then the velocity changes don't matter as the wire inertia is all you're dealing with, and that can be neglected. If you have a bad tensioner, you get varying tension in varying portions of the coil and the occasional broken wire.

I also found a video of a machine winding one-mil-thick metal film on a long, skinny roll. It had an accessory arm that took up, then released additional film approximately in quadrature to the shape of the velocity curve, so the film coming in had an approximately constant velocity. That's probably a good thing to put into a winder if you're doing a new design.

[R.G.]

You are correct in terms of what would truly be the definition of a handwound pickup....literally. I posted this coil winder a while ago which was designed to do just what you're describing.

Cute!

Generally speaking, in the pickup biz, when folks talk about hand winding or handwound, they are taking into account that the bobbin would be spinning on a machine driven by electricity.

Yeah, I know that.

I was just wondering what they'd admit and how open their minds were to debate about what is and isn't hand wound.

[Spence]

Plus there is the whole issue of what "hand wound" is good for. Let's put aside the issue of whether it's really possible or not and assume that I have in my hand two sets of coils. One set is really, truly, no fooling, gen-u-winely hand wound. The second set is completely, 100% wound by a computer driven winding machine, but it's wound with the same wire, same insulation, same tension in each turn of wire as the hand wound one because the computer was able to snoop on the person winding it and can accurately reproduce it.

You do the experiment and let me know. I'm too busy to do any experiments right now but I'm interested to see what you come up with. Just one thing though, I'm guessing you're in the machine-wound are best camp so it's unlikely to change your view. It's fine with me if you decide it's all a huge watse of your time to do an A/B test and post the results here.

[R.G.]

You do the experiment and let me know. I'm too busy to do any experiments right now but I'm interested to see what you come up with. Just one thing though, I'm guessing you're in the machine-wound are best camp so it's unlikely to change your view. It's fine with me if you decide it's all a huge watse of your time to do an A/B test and post the results here.

Too busy to speculate on a thought experiment? Bummer - that's a tough situation you have there if you're too busy to even think about what identical coils might sound like. Or perhaps you just don't like the logical conclusion.

But it's good that you're not too busy to speculate on me and my background at least. At least you have that going on for you.

I proposed the thought experiment to provoke discussion on the issue. I'm guessing that, given that you tried to sidestep it entirely, you're uncomfortable even talking about it, and so you're unlikely to change your views - whatever they are.

Tell us Spence - where on the scale do you do your winding?

And what degree of machine intervention do you think still qualifies as "hand wound"?

Are you at pure hand wound? One hand on the wire and one on the bobbin? Or do you accept some degree of mechanical assistance?

Or are you too busy?

[Zhangliqun]

You have to set the spool at a distance and let the wire unwrap off the top of the spool. It doesn't seem that jerky while it's going. I put the spool behind me on a low stand with the top more or less facing the winder.

I use a boom mike stand set about 5 feet behind me with the spool sitting horizontal on the boom -- and very close to the vertical member so the weight of the spool doesn't tip the stand over. But as Dave says, with the spool so far away, the wire comes off the spool very smoothly.

As for the bobbin, there's just no problem with the oblong shape. The wire, especially 42 wire, is delicate, yes, but it's still a good deal tougher than you would think looking at it. You have to have the tension on the wire guide (fingers or felt) pretty high for it to break, and even tension levels a bit below the breaking point will gradually cause your bobbin to warp as you put more and more wire on the bobbin. Not all that much tension is required to get wire on the bobbin nice and snug.

[JGundry]

Personally I think that if a hand is guiding the wire on 1 of 18 bobbins every bobbin is hand wound. I think the tensioning is really just a maker's preference. There is no tonal advantage or virtue in inefficiency. There is something to be said for good quality control and multi bobbin winding certainly helps with quality control.

[Spence]

Too busy to speculate on a thought experiment? Bummer - that's a tough situation you have there if you're too busy to even think about what identical coils might sound like. Or perhaps you just don't like the logical conclusion.

But it's good that you're not too busy to speculate on me and my background at least. At least you have that going on for you.

I proposed the thought experiment to provoke discussion on the issue. I'm guessing that, given that you tried to sidestep it entirely, you're uncomfortable even talking about it, and so you're unlikely to change your views - whatever they are.

Tell us Spence - where on the scale do you do your winding?

And what degree of machine intervention do you think still qualifies as "hand wound"?

Are you at pure hand wound? One hand on the wire and one on the bobbin? Or do you accept some degree of mechanical assistance?

Or are you too busy?

OK R.G. I didn't realise this was just a thought experiment. I haven't got time to be doing a physical experiment at this time as I do actually have a busy business. Feel free to check my website. You'll see the sort of stuff I do. It's all done like this :

I have a little machine that I made to spin the bobbin with an electronic counter. I guide and hand-tension the wire myself.

I make a lot of pickups so to actually hold a bobbin in my hand whilst trying to get 10,000 turns on there would be stupid especially since neither Fender nor Gibson ever did that. But even if you accept Jon's view that Gibson didn't 'hand-wind' then you have to accept that what Fender did until CBS took over was what we have all come to call hand winding. That's what I do so I hope that's a little clearer for you. If you don't like the term 'hand wound' then that's fine with me.

The issue of identical coils is a difficult one. How can they be identical unless you wind the first entirely by hand with a computer mapping every movement and then replicating that on the entirely machine-wound bobbin. I can't give you a difinite answer to the question of would they sound the same. I'd love to do the experiment for real but I don't have the time or the computer systems to do it. That's why I threw it back to you.

Anyway, why not tell us a little about yourself. It would be interesting to know what you do. I'm not in the least upset if you are into machine winding; it's just a different discipline.

What was it you said?

"I'm guessing that, given that you tried to sidestep it entirely, you're uncomfortable even talking about it, and so you're unlikely to change your views "

I'm not going to change my views that's true.I've been making and selling pickups for a long time now and my customer's would probably be a little taken aback if I suddenly announced that from now on I was going to get my bobbins pre-wound on a CNC machine in Korea.

I do reply to a lot of posts on here R.G. so have a look through the back catalogue. You'll find I never side-step an issue and I'm not afraid to lock horns with other people.

[Steve Conner]

Do you guys have to turn every thread on pickup design into a Cassius Clay style pissing match? I'm the best! I'm the greatest! I wind like a butterfly, sting like a hot Tele bridge pickup! I hate Sam Lee, so I beat him in three!

Of course I've never wound a pickup in my life, far less tried to sell one into a competitive boutique pickup market, so feel free to ignore me

Back when I was obsessed with high voltage, I built a winder for making Tesla resonators. I rigged a motor to spin the "bobbin", but guided the wire by hand. The larger sizes were easy, but when I tried making a tabletop model with a few thousand turns of .125mm wire, it started to get really tricky and I was plagued with the wire snapping all the time. I guess this is different, because a Tesla coil needs a perfect single layer winding without any gaps or turns crossing over each other. But OTOH, .125mm is only 35AWG :-/

My "work" on Tesla coils ended up influencing the way I think about pickups a lot. I always ignore the DCR and look at the inductance, capacitance and resonant peak.

BTW, kevinT, the weather in Glasgow is nice, but I can't really enjoy it. I've just had all my wisdom teeth pulled, and I'm off work and doped up on painkillers :6

[Spence]

"Do you guys have to turn every thread on pickup design into a Cassius Clay style pissing match? I'm the best! I'm the greatest! I wind like a butterfly, sting like a hot Tele bridge pickup! I hate Sam Lee, so I beat him in three!"

Good question. But this is a forum for debate. It does seem like my choice of winding method is just a thinly veiled excuse to have a go at me. Whatever. I'm not bothered. He's only one of a few who seem to have a grudge. Can't get along with everyone.

[Mark Hammer]

I wind all my pickups by hand. "By hand" means I mount the bobbin to the chuck of a hand drill, stick the wire spool on the ground, clamp the drill to the bench, turn the crank by hand, and guide the wire with thumb and index finger. Beats the hell out of when I used to physically wind each turn around the bobbin with my fingers.

Why do I do it this way? Because I buy my wire in large spools from a surplus metal place, and the spools are too idiosyncratic to mount on any sort of home-made machine to feed the wire to the bobbin in a smooth continuous manner. My only choice is to do it by hand so that I can adjust the tension or stop cranking when I feel there is an impending risk of snapping the wire.

If there was a way I could turn the bobbin with a motor without risking wire-snap, I'd do it. All the wind patterns could still be controlled by hand and my writing/picking hand (the right one) would not have to suffer the repetitive strain injury of turning a crank several thousand times.

Would I replace the finger-guiding of the wire itself if I could? Probably. I make pickups only for myself, not for customers, so I'm happy and eager to try out whatever springs forth from that day's experiment and acquaint myself with its pros and cons. Since they require no replication whatsoever, whatever assistance automation could provide me would be graciously received. That assumes that the wire tension would be intelligently adjusted by that mechanical assistance. But in general I'm happy with more scattered and less scattered winds. The inconsistency of my polepieces (salvaged from other pickups or "invented" from things found in hardware stores) also means there is no real urgency to replicate either scatter or more orderly coils since other factors will surely override whatever consistency I might achieve in the winding process.

Keep in mind that having some sort of real-time governor of wire-tension and winding speed is not a bad thing either. I am reminded of the old foot-treadle Singer sewing machine my grandmother had. It was a mechanical device, but the capability it provided the user for real-time control of sewing speed facilitated articulate use of the machine, and deftly turning corners. On the other hand, if you think of the number of times that a sewing needle had to bob up and down to fashion a dress, and the number of times a bobbin has to turn to fashion a pickup, my guess is the dress requires less bobs. Moreover, my grandmother was not attempting to turn out more than one dress in a day. Consequently, the foot-controlled treadle is not impractical for the sewing machine the way a purely hand-controlled device is impractical for churning out pickups at a rate that might reasonably support an individual as a business.

OK, where am I going with this? On the one hand, we have the notion of "hand-winding" as facilitating the uniqueness of a given pickup. The cachet attached to older hand-wound pickups is really more a reflection of the way in which hand-winding increases the variance across pickups such that some are true "tonal outliers", in a statistical sense; they weren't ALL winners - they couldn't be - but some were truly great and distinctive. At the other extreme, the need to run a business and have a product line, implies that one should respect the customer's expectations and provide a consistent product, and consistency implies mechanization and reduction of variance. If you could run a business doing ONLY hand-winds for wealthy customers willing to wait, and willing to accept the result, then you can afford to hand-wind in the purest sense. If your clientele expects to place an order and get a pickup with a known sound at a reasonable price within a reasonable period of time, AND your landlord likes the rent cheque delivered on time, then many aspects of hand-winding will need to be set aside in favour of mechanization.

[JGundry]

Good question. But this is a forum for debate. It does seem like my choice of winding method is just a thinly veiled excuse to have a go at me. Whatever. I'm not bothered. He's only one of a few who seem to have a grudge. Can't get along with everyone.

Spence,

I started this post simply because I have the capability of hand guiding multiple bobbins by hand. I can hand guide as many as 18 bobbins in real time and could easily do more. Right now I'm in the process deciding on my pickup product line. I am certainly going to do machine wound pickups on my Leesona but I am may offer a hand wound line and simply wanted to get the opinion of others on the definition of hand winding. It had nothing to do with you specifically.

[David Schwab]

I use a boom mike stand set about 5 feet behind me with the spool sitting horizontal on the boom -- and very close to the vertical member so the weight of the spool doesn't tip the stand over. But as Dave says, with the spool so far away, the wire comes off the spool very smoothly.

I'm actually using a cup holder! One of these things that looks like a tree and holds four cups.

I needed something to hold the spool the first time I used the winder, so I looked around the house. It holds it at an angle and it works fine. At some point I'll make something, when I get a winder permanently set up.

It's a pain to have to put the cups back on every time.

And yeah, you don't feel the oblong shape at all when it's winding.

[David Schwab]

The issue of identical coils is a difficult one. How can they be identical unless you wind the first entirely by hand with a computer mapping every movement and then replicating that on the entirely machine-wound bobbin. I can't give you a difinite answer to the question of would they sound the same. I'd love to do the experiment for real but I don't have the time or the computer systems to do it. That's why I threw it back to you.

That's a good point about repeatability. As random as hand guided winding is (I still call it "hand winding" because not too many people ever actually hold the bobbin in their hand), I think we can agree that once you come up with a formula, they do all sound the same. And that's a good thing.

I know we've had this discussion in the past, but it seems that there is a difference between a neatly machine wound coil, and one with a scatter pattern. It doesn't seem to matter what the scatter pattern is, as long as it has some randomness to it.

Is there varying degrees of scatter? Or does it just affect the size and tension of the coil?

If I had the opportunity to try winding pickups on a CNC winder, I would. There are a lot of great sounding pickups out there that are not hand wound, so I think, and this is my opinion, that if you can program the correct tension and scatter, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference.

It might even be that those settings must vary as the coil is wound. I'm sure I don't apply consistent tension as I wind, as I often change the speed of the winder to see what I'm doing, and I know the scatter is random.

What leads me to think this is hand carving guitar necks. If you have a nice neck shape and carve it on a CNC router, what's the difference? It's more precise, and you can see that. I have a Warmoth neck here that a customer supplied for a guitar I'm putting together from parts. I don't care for the feel of the neck, but it's nicely made. The Warmoth brothers don't play guitar, so how would they know how to shape a neck?

But I'd love a CNC setup. It would allow me to remove the drudgery of building, and still make the parts the way I want. I love carving necks, but some of the stuff is just tedious and a lot of work!


I think cheap machine wound pickups might sound bad because it's just not a good design to start with, but because of the method involved in making them.

[Spence]

There's a few people like Don Mare who swear by a precise, repeatable scatter patter. I've never been able to repeat a scater pattern so I tend to agree with you Dave that just so long as it's random it works.

If I thought a CNC could turn out consistently brilliant pickups that sound as good as mine I'd be tempted to use one. But whilst I am not convinced and no one has been able to show me proof I am going to stay with hand winding.

The bit I object to is these guys who act like some sort of revolutionary guard who think that if you don't go over to machine wound then it's the firing squad at dawn. I mean, for fuck's sake.........!

[JGundry]

If I thought a CNC could turn out consistently brilliant pickups that sound as good as mine I'd be tempted to use one. But whilst I am not convinced and no one has been able to show me proof I am going to stay with hand winding.

Spence one has to explore. Nobody offered proof to Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, or Seth Lover, who by the way decided PAF's should be machine wound. They found it for themselves.

Everybody loves the wheel it just took some people a little longer than others to decide a car should be attached to it. Perhaps you will decide at some point that you don't have to give up your buggy whip if you are handed a set of car keys.