Strat Single coil and Humbucker crossover

[Cohan]

Hi

I build my own guitars and usually use commercial pickups. I'd like to build a travel guitar for myself that covers many different sounds while on the road.

Ok, I like my Strat and I like my Les Paul. I know that scale is different between the two and that it's not possible to entirely square both. But I can approximate and come as close as possible.

So I would like to make a neck pickup, that is a Strat single coil and a humbucker. To that end, I want two bobbins with the close one to the neck being a strat coil with 7k windings or so and a taping after 5k windings. I also want a a sencond bobbin with reverse 5k windings and reverse polarity. maybe I will just do 7k windings here too and tap them for a vintage and a hot version.

I don't know what to do about the magnets. They could either be strat/strat reversed on the bobbins or humbucker style or strat/ polepieces with magnetic bridge underneath the bobbins.

Maybe somebody has done some work on this and could share experience?
Cheers

[rogerkl]

Hi

I have made a couple of guitars with a tapped single coil combined with a second coil to make a humbucker. For those my thought process was that I wanted the single coil pickup to be most authentic so I used alnico 5 polepieces for the coil that has the full windings.
First guitar, Strat SSS style with "stealth" humbucker coil.
3 normal single coils with alnico 5 pole pieces, except the bridge has tap at 5500 turn (full 8400). I then made a short extra coil to be paired with the bridge. This was created with humbucker slugs, and used a couple of narrow ceramic magnets under the bobbin.
I reverse wound the second coil with 5500 turns and rotated it 180 degrees to make it fit as close to the normal bridge pickup as possible. Could have done a better job with the pickguard though...
I think I used these magnets: https://www.mojotone.com/Ceramic-8-Bar-Magnet-2-35-Long



The second guitar I made pickup for was a dual humbucker guitar. To make sure it was enough space for the full single coil windings with 42 awg, and to make the single coil more like a strat coil, I made a couple of taller bobbins by gluing together 2 slug bobbins.
The screw side was used for the coils that only had humbucker turn, so I kept them as normal.
I then used alnico 5 pole pieces for the single-coil coil and the same ceramic magnet for the humbucker coil.
For this I wound both coils in the same direction as normally done on humbuckers and only made sure they were connected together with opposite phase when in humbucker mode.

I am quite happy with the sound, when used as single coils they sound as single coils, in humbucking mode, probably not exactly PAF's but more beefy than in single coil mode.

Now if you are mostly after authentic humbucker sound with a single coil option, then maybe it would be better to use steel slugs/screws and magnet underneath on both coil instead.

[copperheadroads]

Pickup winders use number of turns NOT DCR as a measurement of some sort . as soon as you figure this out , these questions become irrelevant & you have answered them your self .