Magnets & Copper Wire: A Pickup Building Thread

[Freekmagnet]

I use two wooden discs compressed by a small spring with felt on their inner faces. The tension is adjustable and it's very easy to pull up the top disc if I want to remove the wire. This setup gives me a very consistant winding tension and all I have to do is guide the wire on the bobbin.

Nice! I like that!

 

[Freekmagnet]

Look at these cute li’l coils!

 

[Jon Clegg]

Look at these cute li’l coils!

They're so cute, I'd like to adopt them!

 

[Freekmagnet]

OK, R&D update:

The last pair of coils sound great!

I wound that set with the #44 wire and knocked the count down to 3375 turns. I also set my winder up to cut the wire spacing in half, so I ended up with a much tighter coil. Both weight in at 4.25K.

As I predicted, they have a brighter presence and the mid-voice moved from the upper mids to a spot closer in the middle. The bass is tighter, but overall the pickup has more clarity. I can always make up for the slight loss of bass by kicking the preamp up a notch. What surprised me is that I didn’t lose a noticeable amount of overall output. I figured that I would and I’m not sure why I didn’t; perhaps the shifted midrange gave the pickup a higher perceived output.

Next, I’m going to wind another set and put them side-by-side. Though I’m building a quad coil pickup, I wanted to make it so that each pair can operate independently. Hopefully, that’ll give me a myriad of switching options.

I have a gig this afternoon. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might get to winding up a couple tonight.

 

[Bruce Johnson]

Here's my wire tensioner. Pretty dumb and simple. I positioned it out in front of the center of the spool, so it also acts as the guide off of the spool. The pads are pieces of silicone rubber weatherstrip seal. The thumbscrew clamps the pads together to adjust the tension. The two horizontal pins keep the wire contained within the pads. The whole assembly is on a wood base, sitting on the bench. I can slide it around to adjust the position.

I threw it together back around 2005, and it's been reliable and consistent all these years. I have it set for 25 grams of drag/tension. I sometimes check it when I'm about to wind a batch of coils, but it's stayed right about 25.

How do you measure the tension? With a tension gauge! I have two of them that I bought on ebay for about $15 each. One is 0-50 grams and the other is 0-20 grams. They are available in different ranges. I recommend the 0-50 gram range for pickup coil winding.

I've found by experimenting that 25 grams is a good tension level for the coils I wind. It's enough to make the coils neat and tight, but not up in the range of having problems with breaking the wire. If I remember right, the #41 wire that I use breaks at about 45 grams.

 

[Freekmagnet]

I loaded these li’l monsters into the test bass:

The sounded pretty good, but I felt I could have used a little more, so I experimented with building up this structure:

I got a lot more output, but they were a little too bright. I took the side magnets off and it sounded... awesome! Enough lows to fill a room, enough low-mids to keep the booties bumpin’, enough high mids to have a voice in the band and enough high to keep the hi-fi guys happy. I think I’ll stew on this for a few days at least.

So, I guess it’s a little weird having a big central magnet, but if it works, it works. It makes me wonder if I could make it work another way.

Some details:

Right now, the smaller coils are wired in series and the two sets are parallel.

I’d like to try all 4 coils in series - I’m not sure how much top end I’ll lose, but I’ll try it. I think all parallel would leave me with too little output.

I’d like to try winding the smaller coils in parallel and the whole pickup in series. Perhaps that will give me a little more mids and I can then ditch the center magnet.

I tried the neos again, and I still got something shorting out. I’m baffled, frankly.

I gotta start thinking about housing this pickup somehow. I have a few ideas. I’ll draw some sketches this week.

 

[Bruce Johnson]

Just for fun, try turning the whole thing upside-down, with the magnets on the top. Invert the whole magnetic field, wrapping the more dense end around the strings. That could be interesting.....

 

[Freekmagnet]

Just for fun, try turning the whole thing upside-down, with the magnets on the top. Invert the whole magnetic field, wrapping the more dense end around the strings. That could be interesting.....

That would be worth trying just for the heck of it!

I was also thinking I could try laminating the blades. I have this really thin stainless steel laying around. It might take 3-4 blades to build up to 1/16”. Supposedly it’ll make the pickup a little brighter.

I was rockin’ out on the test bass last night. This is a pretty thick but bright sounding pickup. I’m definitely liking it right now.

 

[Frederiek]

I just finished my first pair of pickups and to my delight they sound great. I was expecting the worst so I may be pretty biased from the fact that they work at all. The original pickups of this bass are high end custom made but I even dare say mine sound nicer. I lack the proper vocabulary plus I'm not all that experienced, but I would say they sound more open and balanced, the neck pickup is a bit rounder and both ends are better defined but not overly present, and they are silent.

This brings up a question: how do you evaluate your pickups? When do you consider your pickups a success? What makes one pickup better than another with identical specifications?

 

[Freekmagnet]

I just finished my first pair of pickups and to my delight they sound great. I was expecting the worst so I may be pretty biased from the fact that they work at all. The original pickups of this bass are high end custom made but I even dare say mine sound nicer. I lack the proper vocabulary plus I'm not all that experienced, but I would say they sound more open and balanced, the neck pickup is a bit rounder and both ends are better defined but not overly present, and they are silent.

This brings up a question: how do you evaluate your pickups? When do you consider your pickups a success? What makes one pickup better than another with identical specifications?

Congrats to you for completing your first pickup build! That's exciting!

How does one evaluate their pickups? That is a really good question. I'll give you my answer, but hopefully some of the other guys will chime in as well.

My answer is this: The what and the when as far as a pickup being a success is entirely subjective and the specs are completely irrelevant. How that success is defined depends largely upon what you are setting out to accomplish with your pickup design. When the pickup sounds good to you, then you're done with it.

I can tell you from a bass sidewinder project I'm working on, I set out to make a pickup that looked super cool and had lots of shiny metal. I also wanted it to have strong attack, lots of clear bass, tasty midrange and enough treble while being able to support a band in live situation. I've been testing the pickups by putting them in a bass and going out and gigging with them.

On my last iteration, I got them so that they sounded pretty good when I played them in my living room. (Keep in mind that I am using these in conjunction with an onboard preamp which I am also "designing".) However, when I got onstage, I could get them to work, but my amp was working way too hard to get them up to a usable volume. I determined that the preamp was outputting too much voltage and the amp just wasn't designed to handle such a large signal. In the end, I had to go back to the testing bench and I have another iteration on the way. I'm using a modified Uncle Fluffy MM preamp and I've narrowed the pickup down to four winds that are both slightly smaller than the last wind. The four winds are 5250 @ 43AWG, 5250 @ 44AWG, 6000 @ 43AWG and 6000 at 44AWG. All of them have roughly the same amount of output, with the higher turns having slightly more output and the lower turns having more "tone". At the end of the day, I am beginning to think that I will be walking away with two different pickups because the 43 and the 44 winds have completely different tonal characteristics - both of which I really like.

My point to you is this: deciding when the pickup us "done" is also a completely subjective determination that I make by going out and seeing if they function in a live situation and seeing how hard I have to work to get the house rocking.

 

[Bruce Johnson]

I was just doing some cleaning and sorting in my shop, and I came across this, the whole set of tooling to make single-coil 7-string bass pickups. Historic stuff now.

This was my first real from-scratch pickup making project, in mid 2005. I was building up a multi-lam neck-through custom 7-string bass for a customer (back when I did custom instrument jobs). At the same time I was starting to work out my own techniques for making up my own pickups for my Scroll Basses. I was designing my coil winding machine, which you saw a few pages back. I boldly offered to make up a set of custom pickups for this bass; wide spacing 7-string Jazz-type pickups with 1/4" Alnico magnets.

So I did. It became a test run of my whole process for building pickups. Machining up aluminum masters of half-bobbins from aluminum; making up silicone molds; casting the bobbin halves from (white) polyurethane resin. Machining up an aluminum master of the outer housing, and a silicone housing mold. After winding the coils, I potted them with CPES epoxy, then cast them in black West Systems epoxy in the housing mold. There are two different length bobbins, for the bridge and neck pickups, but they were both cast into the same size outer housing.

The aluminum disks fit on the spindle of my winding machine, on either side of the bobbin. The flanges of the bobbins fit into the milled recesses, forming a smooth "spool" to prevent any snagging of the wire as it spins. Now you can see why my I made my winding machine so large; it was made to spin bobbins this size. Those disks are almost 6" diameter. These were big pickups, a technical challenge to make.

The whole process of making the bobbins, winding the coils and casting the housing worked quite well. I've refined it over the years, but I still use pretty much the same process today.

I only made one set of those pickups, for that one bass. And I made the bass for the customer as a kit; he finished and assembled it himself. So, I never even got a chance to hear the pickups, not once! He loved the bass, and said that the pickups sounded great. I haven't heard from him in a few years, but last I knew, it was still his main, favorite bass. With my very first pickups.

I've got the tooling all packed away in two boxes, but it's unlikely that I'll ever make any more of them. I'm off in my own world of Scroll Basses now, and special 7-strings just aren't my thing.

But I know how!

 

[Bruce Johnson]

I dug in my archives and found the pictures of making those 7-string bass pickups; July 2005.

Casting the bobbin halves.

Assembling the bobbins and magnets. I staggered the height of the magnets for a 16" radius.

Set up for winding. Look at the size of the disks! But I designed my machine to take them.

The wound coils, with crude-looking termination terminals. They got me thinking to come up with the better design that I use today.

Casting the coil in black epoxy in the housing mold. No shielding shells at that time. These things must be noisy.

The finished pickups, right out of the mold. I didn't really do any other finishing operations to them. They weren't perfect, some pinholes in the epoxy. But the customer was happy with them. At that time, there were no other pickups available in this configuration and string spacing.

I don't remember the wire turns and DCR specs on them. I think they were around 6000 turns of #41.

 

[Beej]

I dug in my archives and found the pictures of making those 7-string bass pickups; July 2005.

Casting the bobbin halves.

View attachment 3413986

Assembling the bobbins and magnets. I staggered the height of the magnets for a 16" radius.

View attachment 3413985

Set up for winding. Look at the size of the disks! But I designed my machine to take them.

View attachment 3413987

The wound coils, with crude-looking termination terminals. They got me thinking to come up with the better design that I use today.

View attachment 3413988

Casting the coil in black epoxy in the housing mold. No shielding shells at that time. These things must be noisy.

View attachment 3413989

The finished pickups, right out of the mold. I didn't really do any other finishing operations to them. They weren't perfect, some pinholes in the epoxy. But the customer was happy with them. At that time, there were no other pickups available in this configuration and string spacing.

View attachment 3413990

I don't remember the wire turns and DCR specs on them. I think they were around 6000 turns of #41.

View attachment 3413991

Another pretty solid piece of evidence that you have forgotten more about luthiery than most of us will ever know...

 

[Freekmagnet]

I made some improvements on my pickup winding apparatus. I generally use really thin cardboard for my bobbins. Why? Because it’s cheap, you don’t need special tools to cut it and I can make the walls thin enough that I can fit enough wire into a small space. The downside is that the bobbins are really fragile and tend to flare out once I lay some wire in them. This unpleasantry is remedied with a set of “holders” I made out of some 1/4” maple I had laying around.

Here’s the cardboard bobbins inside of the holders:

The disk on the right is an MDF assembly that attaches to the winder platen. This allows me to screw the holders down to the surface.

Here it is attached to the platen:

This allows me to easily center the bobbin assembly on the winder. (The photo looks wango, but that because of the lens.) Bruce drilled and threaded a couple of holes on the platen for me. He’s got the tools to put them dead center on that circular part. Anyway this is cool because now I can put all kinds of crazy attachments on my machine. It’s amazing what a pair of holes will do!

Here’s a batch of coils I wound last night:

They all look really good!

I’ll have more updates on this project later.

 

[Freekmagnet]

OK, on to the next part of this puzzle. First, allow me to put on my opinion hat. I use the word “opinion” because I have found that in the pickup-making universe, the ultimate truth is a relative thing. There’s some laws of physics that definitely apply, but at the end of the day there’s a lot of conjecture involved. Ultimately, one winder’s findings may be different from another’s. I’m just stating what I have discovered through my own admittedly un-scientific processes.

Let’s first go over magnetic materials. Most pickups these are made of various grades of Alnico or ceramic and every once in a while you’ll see neodymium. (There’s some weird pickups out there with rubberized magnets, but I just give a brief overview here)

Alnico has been around since the old days, and a lot of “traditional” pickups are made with Alnico - Fender, Gibson etc. Alnico is great because you can design a pickup that has a well-rounded tone - the highs are manageable and the mids are sweet. They’re also pretty versatile and forgiving - you can make a pretty good-sounding pickup by just wrapping some wire around it.

Ceramic magnets are stronger, so you can build a really bright pickup with them. However, they can also make a really stiff and harsh-sounding pickup. Ceramic pickups have a really fast bass response. A lot of more “modern” bass pickups are made with ceramic, but ceramic pickups don't necessarily have to sound "modern". A perennial fave here on TB is the classic T-40 pickup.

Neodymium is relatively new on the scene. I’ve been seeing a few more neo-driven pickups out there lately, but it’s still considered to be kind of “exotic”. Their main characteristic is their intense strength.

I’m writing this in an effort to dispel any myths about neodymium pickups. I’ve been playing with them for a while and they don’t magically make your pickup more amazing and they don’t give your pickup out-of-control output or anything. If anything, most of the pickups I’ve made with neodymium sounded really similar to Alnico-driven pickups. Because of their strength, you will have to alter your design significantly.

I’ve gotten strange requests from people to build things for them like a neodymium p-bass pickup, and my answer is usually, “why?” A p-bass pickup is basically p-bass pickup regardless of what magnet you put in it. Besides you can buy a neo P on eBay for $50. I’ve actually read statements from guys who claim that neos sound so different that the human ear is not ready for the way it sounds!

Anyway I’m calling BS. You can make a good-sounding neodymium pickup, but it won’t be the magnet making the miracle. It’s just a magnet like Alnico or ceramic.

What’s great about neodymium magnets? Well, it’s their intense strength. If you want to make a smaller pickup, then you can use a small neodymium magnet to drive it. Neodymium magnets are available in all shapes and sizes, they’re relatively cheap and it’s easy to experiment with all kinds of cool magnetic structures.

/******/

Next, let’s talk about sidewinders. I’ve been building sidewinders for a couple of years now. I used my sidewinder pickup in my Sirena Modelo Uno. They've been around for a while - most infamously in the Gibson EB-3, but they're pretty uncommon pickups. I believe that this largely because they are more difficult to manufacture, but I'm not sure. While the Gibson pickup isn't the best sounding pickup (they're affectionately known as the "mudbucker"), sidewinders are generally very bright-sounding pickups and have a neutral-sounding midrange. While they are humbuckers, some say that they have an almost single-coil sound. I've heard them described as being "natural" sounding, and I think that is a fair assessment. My theory is that this is largely due to the very narrow sensing area; basically, the central pole does 90% of the work.

I installed my sidewinder in the bridge position, and while it sounds very clear, the narrow sensing area presented a real challenge. The pickup just didn't put out a ton of low end. I ended up having to use a preamp to fill in some of the bottom, enhance some of the mids and cut some of the highs. The bass sounds great and I've been gigging with it, but I wanted to maybe have a pickup that didn't rely so heavily on a preamp.

Bruce and I had been talking about it, and he suggested making a wider pickup with a wider aperture. However, I'd already been down that road, and widening the space between the center and side poles didn't do all that much - again, the central pole does most of the work.

/******/

Next on the list are multi-coils. I haven't a built one myself, so I can't say much about them, but supposedly they are thick and bright sounding at the same time. Theoretically, this would be due to the skinny coils wired in series. The Wal bass and of course, the X-Strange AMB-2 are both loaded with multi-coils.

/******/

Which brings me to new pickup, code-named "Exotica"



I've decided I'm going to attempt to build a neodymium-driven multi-coil linear sidewinder. It doesn't get much more exotic than that

The idea is that I want a small pickup with a wide sensing area. Each string will have it's own sidewinder with it's pole running parallel to the string. This will give me the widest sensing area in the smallest space. The smaller neodymium magnets will allow me to make 8 tiny coils.

Here's a picture of my first attempt, which was an utter failure:

View attachment 3471798

Why did they fail? Well the magnets are really strong and the bobbins and the wire are really fragile. Each set of coils would pull into one another and would either snap the wire or break the bobbin. On my second attempt, I tried putting the magnets underneath the bobbins, but I really had the same problem. I did manage to get 2 strings working and it sounded amazing. Really full sound.

View attachment 3471799

I used some polypropylene I had for the bobbins, but the plastic glue didn't hold. They were falling apart as I was putting them together. And again, the magnets would pull into one another and break the wires.

So, Bruce made this part for me:

This is basically a prototyping jig that will hold everything together while I assemble the coil/pole/magnet pieces. Because of space restrictions, the pickup will pretty much design itself. I can only add so much 44AWG wire. The biggest problem to solve will be the wiring. There's a lot of points of failure. I'm thinking that I might have to design some kind of circuit board to hold the coils in place.

I'm hoping to get started winding this week.

 

[Novarocker]

OK, on to the next part of this puzzle. First, allow me to put on my opinion hat. I use the word “opinion” because I have found that in the pickup-making universe, the ultimate truth is a relative thing. There’s some laws of physics that definitely apply, but at the end of the day there’s a lot of conjecture involved. Ultimately, one winder’s findings may be different from another’s. I’m just stating what I have discovered through my own admittedly un-scientific processes.

Let’s first go over magnetic materials. Most pickups these are made of various grades of Alnico or ceramic and every once in a while you’ll see neodymium. (There’s some weird pickups out there with rubberized magnets, but I just give a brief overview here)

Alnico has been around since the old days, and a lot of “traditional” pickups are made with Alnico - Fender, Gibson etc. Alnico is great because you can design a pickup that has a well-rounded tone - the highs are manageable and the mids are sweet. They’re also pretty versatile and forgiving - you can make a pretty good-sounding pickup by just wrapping some wire around it.

Ceramic magnets are stronger, so you can build a really bright pickup with them. However, they can also make a really stiff and harsh-sounding pickup. Ceramic pickups have a really fast bass response. A lot of more “modern” bass pickups are made with ceramic, but ceramic pickups don't necessarily have to sound "modern". A perennial fave here on TB is the classic T-40 pickup.

Neodymium is relatively new on the scene. I’ve been seeing a few more neo-driven pickups out there lately, but it’s still considered to be kind of “exotic”. Their main characteristic is their intense strength.

I’m writing this in an effort to dispel any myths about neodymium pickups. I’ve been playing with them for a while and they don’t magically make your pickup more amazing and they don’t give your pickup out-of-control output or anything. If anything, most of the pickups I’ve made with neodymium sounded really similar to Alnico-driven pickups. Because of their strength, you will have to alter your design significantly.

I’ve gotten strange requests from people to build things for them like a neodymium p-bass pickup, and my answer is usually, “why?” A p-bass pickup is basically p-bass pickup regardless of what magnet you put in it. Besides you can buy a neo P on eBay for $50. I’ve actually read statements from guys who claim that neos sound so different that the human ear is not ready for the way it sounds!

Anyway I’m calling BS. You can make a good-sounding neodymium pickup, but it won’t be the magnet making the miracle. It’s just a magnet like Alnico or ceramic.

What’s great about neodymium magnets? Well, it’s their intense strength. If you want to make a smaller pickup, then you can use a small neodymium magnet to drive it. Neodymium magnets are available in all shapes and sizes, they’re relatively cheap and it’s easy to experiment with all kinds of cool magnetic structures.

/******/

Next, let’s talk about sidewinders. I’ve been building sidewinders for a couple of years now. I used my sidewinder pickup in my Sirena Modelo Uno. They've been around for a while - most infamously in the Gibson EB-3, but they're pretty uncommon pickups. I believe that this largely because they are more difficult to manufacture, but I'm not sure. While the Gibson pickup isn't the best sounding pickup (they're affectionately known as the "mudbucker"), sidewinders are generally very bright-sounding pickups and have a neutral-sounding midrange. While they are humbuckers, some say that they have an almost single-coil sound. I've heard them described as being "natural" sounding, and I think that is a fair assessment. My theory is that this is largely due to the very narrow sensing area; basically, the central pole does 90% of the work.

I installed my sidewinder in the bridge position, and while it sounds very clear, the narrow sensing area presented a real challenge. The pickup just didn't put out a ton of low end. I ended up having to use a preamp to fill in some of the bottom, enhance some of the mids and cut some of the highs. The bass sounds great and I've been gigging with it, but I wanted to maybe have a pickup that didn't rely so heavily on a preamp.

Bruce and I had been talking about it, and he suggested making a wider pickup with a wider aperture. However, I'd already been down that road, and widening the space between the center and side poles didn't do all that much - again, the central pole does most of the work.

/******/

Next on the list are multi-coils. I haven't a built one myself, so I can't say much about them, but supposedly they are thick and bright sounding at the same time. Theoretically, this would be due to the skinny coils wired in series. The Wal bass and of course, the X-Strange AMB-2 are both loaded with multi-coils.

/******/

Which brings me to new pickup, code-named "Exotica"



I've decided I'm going to attempt to build a neodymium-driven multi-coil linear sidewinder. It doesn't get much more exotic than that

The idea is that I want a small pickup with a wide sensing area. Each string will have it's own sidewinder with it's pole running parallel to the string. This will give me the widest sensing area in the smallest space. The smaller neodymium magnets will allow me to make 8 tiny coils.

Here's a picture of my first attempt, which was an utter failure:

View attachment 3471798

Why did they fail? Well the magnets are really strong and the bobbins and the wire are really fragile. Each set of coils would pull into one another and would either snap the wire or break the bobbin. On my second attempt, I tried putting the magnets underneath the bobbins, but I really had the same problem. I did manage to get 2 strings working and it sounded amazing. Really full sound.

View attachment 3471799

I used some polypropylene I had for the bobbins, but the plastic glue didn't hold. They were falling apart as I was putting them together. And again, the magnets would pull into one another and break the wires.

So, Bruce made this part for me:

This is basically a prototyping jig that will hold everything together while I assemble the coil/pole/magnet pieces. Because of space restrictions, the pickup will pretty much design itself. I can only add so much 44AWG wire. The biggest problem to solve will be the wiring. There's a lot of points of failure. I'm thinking that I might have to design some kind of circuit board to hold the coils in place.

I'm hoping to get started winding this week.

Whew that was a lot of info, but also a great read! I completely agree. In my limited experience and knowledge I've tended to notice the same. Number of coils and coil shape/geometry of the pickup and magnets (field shape), and position along the string seem to have the greatest impact on the voice of a pickup. The wire, magnets, and construction (metal vs plastic cover for example) appear to have minor change the nuance of the voice. I may be completely wrong, but that's just been my experience.

This latest endeavor is a great idea, certainly exotic! Similar to an idea I've had, but yet to try.

My idea is to make a multi coil pickup with the magnets in line of the string like you have, but then mate it to a single coil rail pickup that has the rail perpendicular to the strings like a standard pickup. Then with wiring allow the user to blend between the two to get desired thickness/clarity. Going the route you did with sidewinders sounds like a way to gain both without the need of the rail and complexity of blending the two.

 

[Arie X]

fwiw, i've had good luck with G10 for bobbins.

 

[Freekmagnet]

Whew that was a lot of info, but also a great read! I completely agree. In my limited experience and knowledge I've tended to notice the same. Number of coils and coil shape/geometry of the pickup and magnets (field shape), and position along the string seem to have the greatest impact on the voice of a pickup. The wire, magnets, and construction (metal vs plastic cover for example) appear to have minor change the nuance of the voice. I may be completely wrong, but that's just been my experience.

This latest endeavor is a great idea, certainly exotic! Similar to an idea I've had, but yet to try.

My idea is to make a multi coil pickup with the magnets in line of the string like you have, but then mate it to a single coil rail pickup that has the rail perpendicular to the strings like a standard pickup. Then with wiring allow the user to blend between the two to get desired thickness/clarity. Going the route you did with sidewinders sounds like a way to gain both without the need of the rail and complexity of blending the two.

Wow, sounds like a cool idea for a pickup!

I agree - the size and shape of the coil and magnetic structure are really big factors. I’ve done a few experiments with making the same pickup with different gauges of wire, and while there are definitely very distinct differences in tone, it’s not night and day. It’s more like fine tuning. I’ve done the same with ceramic, Alnico and neodymium magnets, and they do all create a characteristic sound, it’s really the overall design that is the real difference. The magnets largely determine how you’re going to go about creating your design.

The funny part with neos in particular is that their intense strength is a huge factor in the pickup design. Not so much because of how they make the pickup sound, but how you actually construct the pickup (which in turn affects the sound). For instance, last night I was trying to assemble the poles into that jig Bruce made for me, and the magnets just kept popping out. It took me a few hours, but I had to come up with a scheme to glue the partially assembled poles together and press fit them into base. It was the strength of the magnets that made it necessary to break out the vise!

But anyway, that pole structure I came up with to assemble the pickup - that’s going to be a big part of the overall sound.

 

[Freekmagnet]

fwiw, i've had good luck with G10 for bobbins.

G10 is good stuff. You can’t beat it for being both super thin and strong.

 

[Arie X]

G10 is good stuff. You can’t beat it for being both super thin and strong.

speaking of wild magnets, this thing was a prototype magnet holder segment from an undulator i designed and built for one of our national labs some years ago. encased in epoxy and brass, these little praseodymium mags are incredibly strong. their poles are arranged in a up, rt, dwn, rt, orientation in tandem, and basically required a ton of clamping and fixturing to corral them into place. flyouts can be pretty dangerous as these guys will shatter and send shrapnel whizzing about. one of our people got hit in a tooth with a piece and chipped it. assemblers working on high power magnets need face shields, cotton gloves, and no watches, cell phones, pacemakers, or other sensitive inplants. magnetic tools and objects need to be at least 3 feet away from the mags when building these structures.