• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join freeLog in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

Copper tape instead of coil?

Lace Alumitone?
AMPETRONICS Hearing Aid Company based in Newark On Trent Nottinghamshire England, near the VW Dealer and some Car Sales, with a Turning Screw Oppsite and a Main east Train line behind that, to the Right the Bridge of the OLD A1 that used to pass via Newark~

Wow they Moved Northern Rd, Newark-on-Trent, England
OLD PLACE

well they did ship all the production to India
 
Thank you everyone for the awesome replies and helpful hints. Here is my final proposed plan.

I may just rig something up as a winder from a sewing machine.as far as counting the winds, I'm prof just gonna wing it (or attempt to count in my head lol), keep it slow and tight enough to reduce space and just end at a certain thickness.

On my first guitar I used Seymour Duncan Phat Cats, Ephin love em!!! They sound amazing, here is a pic of that guitar.

wp_ss_20140518_0003.jpg

What I did was bought $15 cheap Bass pickups and stripped them for parts. I want to make something similar to the Phat cats. so I cut the original soapbar covers to make plastic sheets, and they will go above and below the original coil mounts to extend them, after I clean up the sheets and cut down the original rims. this should make the overwinding possible without copper overflowing onto the magnet. also using blade design, nickel alloy bars from Mojotone and Neodymium magnets. here is a picture of that

WP_20140729_001.jpg

Secondly, as you can see in the picture, I had some leftover pickup rings from an Ibanez I customized. The Ibanez had Washburn Dimebag pickups installed because I got the Seymour Duncan Dimebucker and the Dean Dimetime placed in my Washburn Dime333. Here is that picture for the hell of it...

wp_ss_20140518_0007.jpg

With those pickup rings, I made a custom frame for the touch pad to the Mini Kaoss Pad I'm installing on these.


The proposed plan is to have Bass pickups similar to the SD Phat Cats, and a 2way switch. I'm making 4 of these pickups, and bought 4 blank 5 string soapbar covers to fit the extra space. The pickup space was already wider than normal soapbars, so that was easy, just have to route in between. The 4 pickups will be placed in a row and the 2 way switch will be set to all on for rhythm and bridge only for leads.
Here is a picture of the Guitar accompanying this bass so you can get an idea of how ridiculous this project is, but A LOT of fun!!!

The 2 way switch is essentially gonna be a series/parallel switch instead of a normal 2 way, basically cutting just the bridge pickup switch down and running the circuit through the other three for switch up to get that fuller tone from series instead of parallel. This is opposed to the guitar which can series/parallel all 4 poles of the pickups and each pole has it's own phase reverser as well.

WP_20140518_017.jpg
 
Last edited:
Over the years I've had lots of ideas that didn't work out as I'd hoped, but there's no better way to learn. Please go ahead and wind a tape pickup. I've never heard of anyone doing this.

Hey man, I'm deff gonna try it someday, I'm still curious to see what it would sound like, but for this project, this uitar and Bass are gonna be my babies lol, so I want them to be perfect. On a bored day I might get a cheap $50 guitar and install a preamp circuit and tapewound pickups to see. If I ever do I will certainly post pics and vid. Thanks man!

I'm curious if it will come out to a dryer tone similar to what a phase reverser sounds like...
 
There is no way you are going to be able to keep count of the number of turns in your head. The last pickups I made had 9000 winds per coil. Your best bet if you don't have a counter is to get a meter and wind all the coils to close to the same resistance.
 
One of the other forum members, mapleglo, constructed a coil-winder using a thrift-store sewing machine. And she used the part of the machine that goes up and down (where the needle normally is) to push a button on a cheap calculator to increment a count each time the coil rotated. Very ingenious. I was quite impressed.

You can see a picture of it in the thread here (it's page 9 of a long thread): http://www.talkbass.com/threads/leafenbacker.1040655/page-9
 
One of the other forum members, mapleglo, constructed a coil-winder using a thrift-store sewing machine. And she used the part of the machine that goes up and down (where the needle normally is) to push a button on a cheap calculator to increment a count each time the coil rotated.

That is freaking genius!!! I might have to see if I could do that
 

Latest posts