| I've tried. I gave up. It's not HARD, just really frustrating if you're trying to do it by hand or in a unique shape. And tedious.
Really tedious.
The wire you've gotta use is so thin that in some cases, it can be more fragile than a human hair. You must wind hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of feet of this wire onto a bobbin. It must not kink or it will break. It must not get caught on the bobbin or it will break. You must not pull too sharply or it will break. And it must not break, or you have to start over again, because it's too thin to be soldered unless you have the eyes and hands of a surgeon, and lots and lots of patience. (Some irons, just as a friendly aside, can get so hot that they vaporize the wire completely on contact. I'm serious.) Any joins must also be coated in lacquer, or you will almost certainly have grounding issues.
Humbuckers require that you not only do this twice, but with EXACTLY THE SAME amount of wire each time. (Okay, it doesn't have to be down to the micrometer, but the futher off you are, the more hum you'll get.)
I was trying to make magnetic violin pickups. I went through many prototypes and eventually had hand-wound a 'rail' pickup prototype and a single-string cylindrical pickup prototype. Both worked. But they didn't work particularly well. Output was low and tone was crappy - in order to improve these, I would have needed thinner wire, and at least ten hours winding each coil by hand (2 hours gave me a just-barely-audible-over-the-hum sound at max volume and max gain.) I gave up at that point. (Coincidentally I stopped playing violin round about that time, but I suspect that even had I not given up the instrument, I would have given up thje project.)
If you're planning to use a non-standard shape, getting materials will be hard. Be prepared to make them yourself... magnets included, in many cases.
I know this seems daunting, but it can in fact be done. The question is, why do it when you can buy one that will quite likely, be better?
YMMV. This is all just my experience.
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Sing a song of six bars, turn the amps up high
four and twenty kilowatts, makes you wanna cry.
- Steven Howard
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