| By :
Eduardo Munroe
Being a keen guitar player and someone who has dabbled in putting together various guitars for years, the urge to construct my first guitar pickup was overpowering. For those of you who don't know, guitar pickups are to a guitar what a microphone will be to a singer. Put simply, it's a method of enabling the guitar to become electronically amplified. I collated every piece of information I possibly could from the net and several publications, and with my experience in customising guitars I was prepared to take on the task. As my guitar is a Les Paul model I'll be creating a humbucker style pickup instead of the single coil pickups found on most Fender guitars. The very first thing I had to do was to assemble all the guitar pickup parts essential for the building process. Luckily a British pickup company offered every part I needed for my project. Lovely! The second thing I needed to do was to construct a simple pickup winding system. Essentially whatever electronically spins and will allow control of the speed could be utilised at the heart of your pickup winder. A simple electric motor or your old electric powered drill will suffice with some customisation. I proceeded to go for the drill method which I postioned in a wooden frame. It's also vital that you add some sort of digital or mechanical counter to add up the rotations as how many turns is vital to the output of the completed pickup. I used an uncomplicated reed switch attached to a digital counter which did the trick perfectly. I can't go into the building of the machine here but suffice to say that it was pretty trouble-free. There are various articles and video tutorials on the net on the subject. At the centre of the pickup are two plastic bobbins which will carry 5000 turns each of 42 AWG wire. This wire is as fine as a human hair and therefore will take practice to handle and spin. Once the bobbins are spun they require thin jump leads to be soldered at the start and end of each coil. One of the bobbins has 6 metal slugs pressed inside the holes and the other has 6 pole screws added. The completed bobbins are then attached to a steel baseplate and soldered just where necessary. There's an Alnico 5 magnet placed between the bobbins and the base along with a maple spacer and keeper bar. Once everything is screwed and soldered in position the time had come to test my pickup, and to my surprise, I had a fantastic sounding pickup. I've naturally whizzed through the procedure and yes, I did make a couple of errors that needed correction, but I must say how fulfilling it had been. Now I'm ready for my next effort.
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