Pickup Building - The Hard Way

[spud1950]

Thought you guys might find this amusing. I love this guys ingenuity. There's a sound sample of the pickups at the bottom of the second page. I think they sound pretty good!

http://galileo.spaceports.com/~fishb...ck/humbuck.htm

[Rosewood]

That would be the log cabin approach.

[David Schwab]

He goes through all that to make a counter, and then uses a hand crank drill....

[Mark Hammer]

I make and have made all of mine in a similarly crude way, only I don't even use a counter. Hand drill, clamped to the bench, spool of wire on the ground and a piece of paper and pencil on the counter.

[David Schwab]

My very first winder was a sewing machine motor screwed down to a phenolic base that had two L brackets on it that seemed to have been made to hold a roll of something (my dad found the thing somewhere).

I made a bobbin holder by cutting one of those fiberglass snack trays up into 2 circles, with screws and nuts to hold the bobbin between them, and a metal coat hander, plastic straw, and a rubber band. The plastic drinking straw went through the bobbin holder, which spun on the coat hanger wire mounted on the L brackets, and the rubber band was used for a drive belt.

No counter though. I just wound and then took a reading with my analog meter kit I got from radio shack (the light blue one).

I think that was 1974 or so.

[Possum]

...

I have alot of respect for that guy doing what he did, what a cool guy. If he ever got into making pickups he would be someone to watch. When you learn to make pickups the hard way from scratch you learn a helluva lot more than buying SM kits, throwing one together and becoming an instant pickup genius. I am really thankful for Lollar's book being available when it was and that he helped me through figuring out his book, if I ran a pickup making school I would start students the same way his book does, by making pickups from scratch, its a valuable skill you'll always use....

[David Schwab]

When you learn to make pickups the hard way from scratch you learn a helluva lot more than buying SM kits, throwing one together and becoming an instant pickup genius...

Just don't use perf board!

[spud1950]

I have alot of respect for that guy doing what he did, what a cool guy. If he ever got into making pickups he would be someone to watch.

I agree. If you haven't yet done so,go to his home page and check out the other stuff he's done.Really great stuff.He's built some really nice instruments in the same manner. Quite an ingenious guy.He built the guitar that those humbuckers are in.

[Mark Hammer]

Jon/John Tirone/Fisher (same guy, two names) has made a bunch of things and posted snapshot diaries of them on-line, including archtops and other musical devices of surprising beauty and quality.

[Awhy]

I used that guys page about a year ago to make my first pickup every... only mine involved popsicle sticks and gorilla glue. I also wound it by hand using recycled wire from an old pickup.

The funniest part is that is actually worked

[Dave Kerr]

Awhy, with common nails as pole pieces, and fridge magnets? Someone found a guy with a similar build a while back, many chuckled at how crude the process was, yet most agreed that the pickups sounded pretty good. They were installed in a bass, iirc.

[RedHouse]

His sound byte sounds pretty good too, specially considering the rudementary tooling he used to produce the pickups.