As a keen guitar player and someone who has dabbled in building electric guitars for quite a while, the urge to produce my first guitar pickup was overpowering. For those who don’t know, guitar pickups are to a guitar exactly what a microphone would be to a singer. Put simply, it’s a method of allowing your guitar to become electronically amplified.
I collated all the information I possibly could from the net and many different books, and with my experience in customising guitars I was ready to take on the project. As my guitar is a Les Paul style I’ll be constructing a humbucker type pickup instead of the single coil pickups found on most Fender guitars.
The first thing I needed to accomplish was to put together the many guitar pickup parts required for the building procedure. Happily a UK pickup company offered every part I needed for my project. Lovely! The second thing I had to do was to build a simple pickup winding machine. Basically anything that electronically spins and allows control of the speed may be utilised at the centre of your pickup winder. A simple motor or your old electric powered drill will be sufficient with some customisation. I proceeded to go for the drill option which I secured inside a wooden structure. It is also imperative that you include some sort of digital or mechanical counter to count the rotations as how many turns is crucial to the output of the completed pickup. I used an uncomplicated reed switch along with a digital counter which functioned beautifully.
I will not go into the building of the machine at this point but suffice to convey that it was really simple. There are many articles and videos on the web on the subject.
In the centre of the pickup are two plastic bobbins which will hold 5000 turns each of 42 AWG wire. This wire is as fine as a human hair and as a consequence usually requires practice to handle and spin. Once the bobbins are spun they require thin jump leads to be soldered to the start and end of each coil. One of the bobbins has 6 steel slugs pushed inside the holes and the other has 6 pole screws added. The completed bobbins are then attached to a metal baseplate and soldered where necessary. There’s an Alnico 5 magnet placed between the bobbins and the base in addition to a maple spacer and keeper bar.
Once everything is screwed and soldered in place it was time to try my creation, and to my surprise, I had an excellent sounding pickup.
I’ve clearly whizzed through the progression and yes, I did make a few mistakes that needed correction, but I have to say how rewarding it had been. Now I’m set for my next effort.