How much wire needed

[Shepherd]

Is there some way to figure out how many pickups can be made with a certain amount of wire? Say per pound of wire you can get so many strat, tele, etc. pickups. Just need a rough idea so I dont order too much wire. Thanks

[big_teee]

Your just guessing.
Buy all you can afford.
Get a pound, or if you can afford it buy a 6-7 lb roll of 42 SPN.
That is a good all purpose wire, and You will use it up before you know it.
This is what Stewmac says about their 42 poly.
A 1/2-pound roll with over 25,000 feet of poly-coated pickup wire, sufficient for winding 5-6 single-coil pickups, or 2-3 humbuckers.


Magnet Wire Contacts:

Remington Industries
Larry Jauch
Phone/Fax 815/385-1987
Sales@RemingtonIndustries.com
Magnet Wire

MWS Wire Industries
Copper Wire Manufacturer, Specialty Wire Manufacturer
MWS Sales Contact & Email
Diana Avery
Westlake Village, Ca USA
diana@mwswire.com
Diana Avery-Cizmas
MWS Wire Industries
PH (818) 991-8553
FX (818) 706-0911

BAE Wire
They sell in 3 and 5 Inch Spools Approx. 1.5-6.5 lb
Teena Ridicoloso
BAE Wire & Insulation Inc.
941-309-0900 Phone
941-309-9473 Fax
TeenaR@baewire.com

[copperheadroads]

Guess what ? That Stewmac wire comes from Hockeyville Magnet Wire | Electrowind
It's Essex wire

[ReWind]

Hey, if you wind as tight as I do, you can make a few humbuckers with about 10 meters of 42PE.

[big_teee]

Hey, if you wind as tight as I do, you can make a few humbuckers with about 10 meters of 42PE.

For Newbies gathering info?
Rewind is just Kidding!
I think!
T

[ReWind]

Yes, Terry. I'm making fun of myself for my own struggles with measuring tension accurately at full winding speed (very fast in my case).

It definitely takes miles of 42PE to make a few humbuckers.

[SonnyW]

Is there some way to figure out how many pickups can be made with a certain amount of wire? Say per pound of wire you can get so many strat, tele, etc. pickups. Just need a rough idea so I dont order too much wire. Thanks

OK Shepherd, this is a bit late, but I thought since I was winding a humbucker today, I could just weigh one bobbin empty and full. My scale has a tare function, so the weight of 42 PE on this humbucker slug bobbin is .048 lb. This particular one has 5540 turns. Call that .05 lb per bobbin or 0.1 lb per pickup and for this particular style, a vintage toned HB you could get about 10 pickups per pound of wire if everything went perfectly, and you had no mistakes or rewinds at all. It won't usually be like that, but you can at least get an idea of the theoretical. A lot depends on how many turns you put on, of course, which is why I gave the turns count. I did the same kind of thing for a strat pickup that has 8360 turns of 42 SPN. That comes out to .072 lb per strat pickup or call it 12 - 13 pickups per pound in a perfect world. For this pickup it is probably closer to 13 because my rough measurement did not include the weights of solder and potting wax the finished comparison pickup contained. YMMV but, that should give you a rough idea.

[copperheadroads]

I've been meaning to get a very accurate scale for doing rewinds on some of the odd pickups,to determine how many turns .The average everyday scale will get you in the ballpark like Sonny explained

[jack briggs]

On a HB or P90 you have an average of close to 6" per wrap over the entire coil, so a 5500 wrap coil would have about a half mile of 42SPE. MWS states about 50940 feet/lb. so do the math. About 9-10 HB coils per pound is what I come up with.


Cheers,

[SonnyW]

I've been meaning to get a very accurate scale for doing rewinds on some of the odd pickups,to determine how many turns .The average everyday scale will get you in the ballpark like Sonny explained

That is a good idea I think. That's how I determined the winding counts on those old Rickenbacker horseshoe pickups I rewound a while back. I tried to unwind to count turns, but the wire was too brittle and overlapped. Weighing the coils before and after cutting off the wire, then knowing the wire diameter, and ohms/lb from published data let me calculate the turns needed. I have a chart from Elektiksola that gives the ohms/lb by gauges. Customer really liked the result so it worked for me.