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Anyone wound their own pickups?


Twigman
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After the Wal talk at the bass bash on Saturday and seeing the insides of a Wal pickup - each magnet has its own coil.....I am tempted to have a go at winding my own pickup.

Has anyone tried this?

Any tips on methods to count windings?

Sources for rod magnets/fibreboard?

Any tips?

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I have, made a winder from an old printer motor and a mechanical counter from an old reel 2 reel tape.
Made a few DB pickups but found it really fiddly, failing eyesight didn't help either.

Its well rewarding though, when you get some noise from a few magnets and copper wire. Amazing how easy and low-tech the whole process is.

Pretty much everything here ..

http://www.mojotone.com/guitar-parts/Pickup-Parts

Good Luck !!
IanM

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I've wound a few guitar pickups and one bass pickup, though nothing of the Wal multi-coil sort. I got my magnets from Cermag [url="http://www.cermag.co.uk/"]http://www.cermag.co.uk/[/url] and my wire from Brocott's [url="http://www.brocott.co.uk/"]http://www.brocott.co.uk/[/url] . I've used vulcanised fibreboard which came in small quantities from eBay sellers, but you could improvise with other materials too. I used tufnol sheet on one, because I had a scrap piece lying around. I didn't count windings; since I've only done single coils (rather than matched coils for humbuckers) I've just wound until the bobbin looks full and then checked the resistance. For bridge/neck pairs I just would the bridge a bit fuller than the neck.
My winding setup was fairly haphazard, I just strapped a small hobby drill to a piece of wood and wired it up to a little speed controller PCB which came from eBay. I had a bit of dowel with sections of cork on it to guide the wire and set the horizontal travel, and tensioning was done by hand.

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