Angled pickups - humbucker setup

[RedHouse]

[StarryNight]

Wow, nice bench!

Well, the pickups are done and all packaged up for the customer.

It was an interesting project and if they produce a usable tone, I'll add them to the offering. Not sure how that is going to turn out at this point as they will definitely be on the very low output side of things. I wound the neck to 7.6kΩ and the bridge to 7.8kΩ. However, the inductance was a little lower than I would have preferred with 2.3H and 2.4H for the neck and bridge respectively. Mike S. was definitely right about the inductance levels inherent in this design.

The physical bobbin dimensioning to 16° for the fanned fret setup was pretty straight forward with the laser. Again, my only hope is that I end up with a usable tone.

Here is a look at the final product.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]58176[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]58177[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]58199[/ATTACH]

Thanks everyone for your input. It all helped.

Udpate. . . Also added a shot of the progress of the ultimate destination sent to me by the luthier.

[kayakerca]

Wow, nice bench!

That bench shot is the luthier's shop. Mine looks more like a room full of pickup parts and a winder.

[Lyrebird Steve]

Hi Jim,

could you have gone down the path of using Maple for the bobbin construction like these P90 kits

https://www.stewmac.com/kits-and-pro...er-bobbin.html

https://www.stewmac.com/articles-and...le-bobbin.html

Cheers
Steve

[kayakerca]

Hi Jim,

could you have gone down the path of using Maple for the bobbin construction like these P90 kits

https://www.stewmac.com/kits-and-pro...er-bobbin.html

https://www.stewmac.com/articles-and...le-bobbin.html

Cheers
Steve

That is how I make my P90 bobbins on the laser cutter, with the maple 1/4" core piece. It works well for the P90 bobbins.

I was originally thinking about that setup for the 16° pickups, but opted not to for a number of reasons, the most important was that the luthier wanted a humbucker pickup that didn't sound like a traditional humbucker pickup. I also didn't want to do a screw side/slug side humbucker as I was concerned with the size I would have to make the slug side core to accommodate the larger slugs (relative to a P-90 screw core size). I was worried it might have to be thicker than would work nicely as there would be less surface wood on the core to make sure there was a significant amount of surface to glue to the top and bottom flatwork. The pole piece spacing is non standard because of the stretching out of the spacing required by having the pickup on an angle, so I would need to make custom keepers. It would also have required a one off drilled baseplate (which wouldn't be a huge deal) for the screw pole pieces. All that to say I went with a pair of rod magnet single coil design pickups put together as a humbucker.

[kayakerca]

Well, here are those angled pickups in the guitar. Another beautiful guitar build by Mike Sankey here in Ottawa.




A little audio clip of the tone characteristics here. . .

[John_H]

These were my only experience building angled humbuckers. Coincidentally also 16*, but for a seven string. Double slug, using bobbins and magnets from Guitar Parts USA. I made the base plate from forbon with a brass strip attached for added coupling, and to mimic more typical humbucker construction. I wanted a low profile to avoid a deep neck rout. They sounded like I was hoping they would. Making custom covers and rings is always fun.

[John_H]

Trying again.