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Magnets & Copper Wire: A Pickup Building Thread

#781
Seeing how I've basically only dipped my toes in the last, what is it now, 6-7 mo?, By joining TB, picking brains and doing one semi build, I currently estimate that I will mostly build as a hobby. If I build a few to sell, I will purchase ready-made electronics and hardware. At least on the first few. But, I still would like to learn and try to build some pups. It seems fun, interesting and challenging. Maybe it'll be a bust, or maybe I'll get lucky and knock out a really great design with a good sound. Maybe then I'd invest in an advanced winder and look to source materials in an efficient manner. But honestly, it seems like a lot of folks are already into pup building and most of the ground is fairly covered (I know Bruce will yell at me and say there's still so much uncharted water in the pup world and we should all be building,..... Everything).
I don't want to get off the topic of pups, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about bridges and bridge design. I feel like there's a million different designs and honestly, I don't love any of them. I feel like that's a road I might go down at some point. I may fail miserably and never come up with anything. But there's an itch in my brain for it that a can't find a long enough coat hanger for.
 
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#783
Novarocker said:
Nice, I've seen that and some similar for guitar, but have never inquired about bass designs.
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@Novarocker To be clear, for bass I use(d) the Twangmaster guitar pickup under a humbucker cover with no holes. It functions perfectly well in this application and there is no need to fuss with updated tooling. I haven't built a bass with generic humbucker routs in a while, but there will probably be more in my future.
 
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#785
Since we've veered into some discussion on guitar pickups, and Fender style pickups, I'm in the middle of a "Fender humbucker" guitar design at the moment. Aiming to create something that gives a good, straightforward hard rock/classic rock humbucker tone when in series - and a nice jangly "that's definitely a Fender" single coil tone when split. Basically, it's two strat pickups stuck next to each other under a PAF humbucker style cover. I don't know why pickups like this aren't more common, they coil split into a much more useful tone than a typical PAF humbucker built with a bar magnet and steel poles.

IMG_20210817_170421.jpg


This is the thicker vulcanized fiber material from ponoko. It's thick! Nice and rigid but almost too thick to be practical. I ended up chamfering the holes for the pole pieces on the inside face of the flatwork to reduce the thickness that the pole has to be pressed through. I like a nice tight fit on the poles but with the sticky laser cut residue on this thick flatwork it was almost too much. Chamfering the holes was quicker than cleaning out the laser residue.
 
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#787
BTL said:
@dwizum That looks really great, nice work!
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Thanks! The only real struggle I have left with this design is naming it. I've generally named my bass pickup models with boring descriptive names (Split Coil Humbuckers, Jazz Blades, etc) but my guitar pickups with more creative names (Jivemaster, Tim's Enchanters, Moose Bites, TK421, Large Marge, etc). But I'm kinda out of ideas...
 
#793
It's solid unplated nickel. So it's invisible magnetically and fairly benign in terms of eddy currents (compared to, say, a brass cover like is found on some cheap import pickups) but does contribute to shielding.
 
#797
The cover is an off the shelf part, I get it from philadelphia luthier supply or mojotone. Nickel covers like this are pretty common for PAF style pickups. I use their traditional PAF covers (with just a single row of holes) for a couple of my humbucker designs:

IMG_20210717_162534.jpg


And I use another of their covers with holes down the middle for my Jivemaster design, which is basically a mashup of a Jazzmaster single coil with a P90:

IMG_20210616_165756.jpg
 
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#799
I assume that those covers are actually made from Nickel-Silver, not sheet Nickel. Nickel-Silver is a misleading name, because it's an alloy of brass, which has a silver-ish color. NS is a nice metal to work with, easy to cut, bend, and solder together. It works about like brass. And it's non-ferric, non-magnetic.

Nickel is a very hard, brittle metal. I don't think you can even buy it in sheets. But Nickel-Silver is often just called Nickel.
 

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