I’ve Just Built My First Guitar Pickup And It Sounded Great!
- January 20th, 2012
- By admin
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As a keen guitar player and somebody who has dabbled in building electric guitars for quite some time, the urge to produce my very first guitar pickup was too much to handle. For those of you who don’t know, guitar pickups are to a guitar exactly what a mic would be to a singer. In other words, it’s a means of making it possible for the guitar to be electronically amplified.
I collated every piece of information I could from the net and many different publications, and with my background in customising guitars I was all set to take on the task. As my guitar is a Les Paul type I’ll be building a humbucker style pickup rather than the single coil pickups found on most Fender guitars.
The first thing I needed to do was to assemble all of the guitar pickup parts essential for the building procedure. Luckily a UK pickup provider offered for sale every part I required for my task. Wonderful! The second thing I had to do was to produce a simple pickup winding machine. Basically something that electronically spins and will allow control of the speed can be implemented at the heart of your pickup winder. An elementary motor or your old electric drill will be all you need with some customisation. I went for the drill method which I secured in a wooden frame. It’s also imperative that you include some type of digital or mechanical counter to add up the cycles as how many turns is critical to the output of the completed pickup. I made use of a straightforward reed switch along with a digital counter which worked perfectly.
I will not get into the building of the machine at this point but suffice to state that it was pretty trouble-free. There are lots of articles and videos online on the subject.
At the centre of the pickup are two plastic bobbins that will carry 5000 turns each of 42 AWG wire. This wire is as fine as a human hair and thus calls for practice to handle and spin. Once the bobbins are spun they require thin jump leads to be soldered to the beginning and end of each coil. One of the bobbins has 6 steel slugs hard pressed inside the holes and the other has 6 pole screws added. The completed bobbins are then attached to a metal baseplate and soldered just where necessary. There’s an Alnico 5 magnet placed between the bobbins and the base together with a maple spacer and keeper bar.
Once everything is screwed and soldered into position the time had come to test my pickup, and to my wonder, I had an excellent sounding pickup.
I’ve naturally whizzed through the process and yes, I did make a few errors that needed correction, but I have to say how enjoyable it was. Now I’m all set for my next effort.