Tattoo Coil Winder

[pilotingPete]

So, I've been working on my own pickup winder as a bit of a side project. It started out as the typical sewing machine mod, but I'm now designing a scratch built winder.

Long story short, in my googling I came across this "Coil Winder" for tattoo guns. This winder looks pretty cool, counts winds, and looks like it reverses direction. It's cheap too. DIAL Tattoo Coil Winding Machine Make your own tattoo coils - Monster Steel

Well, I won't let this discourage me as I'm having fun working on mine, but I thought the tattoo gun winder was pretty cool, and might be just what someone wants for their pickup winding endeavors!

[Rick Turner]

Very Steam Punk! The kind of thing you'd want to have at some event pretending that that is how you make pickups...kind of like Seymour hand winding at guitar shows.

[David Schwab]

Rick, didn't you start by literally winding by hand? I remember reading the interview where your wife walked in and asked you something and you lost count! lol

My first winder was cobbled together from an old sewing machine motor, and some kind of an industrial spool holder and a coat hanger, drinking straws and a rubber band! I made the bobbin holder from one of those fiberglass snack tables people used to use back in the 70s! I used a hole saw to cut two disks and had bolts and nuts to hold them together. The coat hanger wire was the axle and the drinking straws were bearings.

I had no counter, so I would wind a while, and then sand the wire in a spot, fold some aluminum foil over that spot, and take a reading with my analog Radioshack meter!

Wish I took photos of it back then. This was probably 1978 or so.

[Rick Turner]

David, yes. My first pickups, circa 1969, were literally hand wound. After about a dozen, I went to the usual sewing machine motor winder with a counter that had come off of a fishing line length counter from a hardware store. They sold fly fishing line by the foot or some such, and had a calculation for the diameter of a pulley. Quite obscure, and it counted double the actual turns. Next was a heavily modded mini-metal lathe that Ron Wickersham cobbled together with auto count, auto stop, and auto traverse. It was a "fly winder"...the bobbin stayed stationary and the wire was spun around it through a shaped brass tube chucked up in the lathe head. The wire fed through the head. Pretty cool setup. That winder did several thousand pickups in my time at Alembic.