new pickup winding machine

[Possum]

My car windows are already clean, don't need kindling for the fire. My winder will remain invisible, you can hear what it does in anything I make ;-) Got a nice endorsement from Mick Grabham (Procol Harum), check TheGearPage for details ;-) He liked what it does.....Mick owned a real 59 Les Paul for about ten years back in the glory days.
I will add, that is a cool piece of history you have; at my age I'm not into collecting shit around here, I already know four guys at our jam from my generation who've kicked the bucket last couple years, so I don't have much interest in collecting anything. I do buy vintage oddball pickups off Ebay now and then, the Charlie Christian pickup in particular was a real eye opener and made a decent clone of what I found, way different than what everyone is making.

[David King]

Well I'm glad we cleared that all up. Gee what else can we talk about now?
Possum, I will check out the CNC course as you seem to think it was worth your time and money. When I think "CNC course" I think "Here is a new Fadal 40-20 5 axis mill with Visual Cam and Solidworks attached, here is a 2000p booklet that explains it's basic operation."

There are a lot of ways to skin the cat, making pickups doesn't have to be rocket science if you have happy customers who are willing to pay you a living wage.

[Possum]

No, the course is at a level you can understand and isn't real long, its aimed at dummies like me :-) The seller is Hubbard. It describes the different kinds of stepper motors, you get a motor and all the boards and power supply you need to run the motor, and a basic working version of the software. I ended up buying the software for $55 and its all I use. The only problem I had was the motor would jump around from some kind of noise interference and he told me to put a certain value capacitor over the power supply leads if I remember right and it stopped that problem, maybe the new version of the book has that included hopefully. I have since upgraded to a new motor with more degrees of rotation, but I don't think its actually necessery to do so and the $5 motors are probably all you need. Find a linear drive you can connect a stepper motor to and you're on your way. I don't see any on Ebay like I got at the moment, I bought about four different ones for real cheap and built a wire guide on one. No, making pickups isn't rocket science but the technical stuff balanced with the artful end of things is the way to go. The technical helps understand the art......

[Possum]

Jon, here's a cool old winder for you, it has the COMPLETE set of gears for it. Probably the Variac was added for fine tuning the TPL:
bobbin/coil winding machine model number CS | eBay

[JGundry]

Jon, here's a cool old winder for you, it has the COMPLETE set of gears for it. Probably the Variac was added for fine tuning the TPL:
bobbin/coil winding machine model number CS | eBay

I have 6 of those already. Four of mine are the tailstock version. The cheapest one I have cost me $125. They usually have a variac built into them so this one is probably a very early Coweco. The TPL is set with gears not the variac. The variac just controls the overall winding speed, TPL stays the same no matter what the winding speed. Very cool all around machines. Great for early Fender machine guided pickups but if you have one with the sloped cam you can cover just about any size pickup coil.

[geofftnc]

I am a new poster for this site and I have available in the Dallas Texas area several fully functional Stevens 412 AML winders. Also a Leesona 108, a Boesch toroidal winder, a Universal toroidal winder and 2 Universal 108 winders. If anyone is interested. Please let me know.

[JGundry]

I am a new poster for this site and I have available in the Dallas Texas area several fully functional Stevens 412 AML winders. Also a Leesona 108, a Boesch toroidal winder, a Universal toroidal winder and 2 Universal 108 winders. If anyone is interested. Please let me know.

I think the 412 is a heavier duty Stevens winder that would work but the preference for pickup making would be the fine wire Stevens model. Also the Leesona 108 is a bit of a monster that I don't think people are using for pickup coils.