Fender's weird pickups (from Highway One strat)

[hendrix_inspiration]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to make pickups and i am new on this forum. I wound 6 pickups on my own equipment. For now, my purpose is to understand the wire resistance, magnets and inductance. My fender strat is Highway One and it have extraordinary pickups which talked some forums also. Dc values of all 3 singles are between 11 and 12kohm i also measure and verify.

After i started to make pickups, i realized that it is hard to reach 7-8kohm by using the plastic bobbin which have standard dimensions. Altough i use the winding area of my bobbin full with 42awg wire, i can reach 6.8kohm max. When i saw the fender one i really shocked. They used nearly the half of the winding area of their plastic bobbin and reach the resistance above 12kohm.

My question is how can it be possible? I know that the resistance value is not only thing to have to work on but it is important and i think i miss some tricky point.

[mozz]

They are using 43awg or 44awg wire.

[Helmholtz]

Thinner wire?

[hendrix_inspiration]

I also thought the possibility of using thinner wire. My wire is 42awg(0.063mm) and lets assume they use 44awg(0.050mm). Same number of spin with 44awg results 1.58 times more resistance ((0.063/0.050)^2). 8000 spins of my wire gave me 6.05kohm, then 8000 spin of 44awg wire will give 9.55kohm. This is still far away from 12kohm.
*I ignored the diameter effect on total length of 8000 spins for each different wire. However; it seems obvious that there is very little material in the fender pickup.

Anyway, is there a possibility of using 45 or 46awg wires? First i saw the 42awg, i said this is crazyness. I can't imagine thinner wires.

[Helmholtz]

These are obviously hotter, non-vintage spec PUs.
For higher output you need more turns and that's probably the reason why they had to use thinner wire.

[Jim Shine]

I also thought the possibility of using thinner wire. My wire is 42awg(0.063mm) and lets assume they use 44awg(0.050mm). Same number of spin with 44awg results 1.58 times more resistance ((0.063/0.050)^2). 8000 spins of my wire gave me 6.05kohm, then 8000 spin of 44awg wire will give 9.55kohm. This is still far away from 12kohm.
*I ignored the diameter effect on total length of 8000 spins for each different wire. However; it seems obvious that there is very little material in the fender pickup.

Anyway, is there a possibility of using 45 or 46awg wires? First i saw the 42awg, i said this is crazyness. I can't imagine thinner wires.

Are you factoring in insulation? Is your example 42awg Formvar or heavy build? A 42awg Formvar or heavy build insulation wound coil will be significantly larger in size than a 42awg single build or plain enamel insulation wound coil to the identical amount of turns.

[epizootics]

There are a few factors to take into consideration here. First, I assume you hand-guided the wire when you wound your pickup? Hand-guided vs. machine-wound makes a difference. Machine-wound coils are more regular, with each turn of wire as close to parallel to the others as possible. This makes for a smaller coil.

How much tension is applied to the wire when winding also matters. More tension -> smaller coil.

The other thing would be the dimension of the bobbin. I see you are using a plastic bobbin for your pickup and those usually have a larger core. Larger core -> less room for the wire. Also, did you measure the height of both bobbins? Yours might be a bit shorter from what I see.

I would agree with the others and assume that it is simply a case of the Fender pickups using thinner wire, either 43 or 44 AWG. Those are very common gauges. Once you get used to winding with 42 AWG, I swear they won't look that scary any more. I use 46 AWG on a regular basis and it is honestly not that bad to work with.

If you haven't used it yet, I recommend you check out the Coil Estimator. It is a great tool that allows you to predict how much wire of a given gauge you can fit on a bobbin depending on its dimensions.

http://www.jdguitarworks.com/coil/coil.html

[copperheadroads]

Most likely they are wound with 44 gauge wire & none of Fender standard pickups have any kind of scatter to them ,