Make A Guitar Pickup

How to make a single coil guitar pickup ? ? ?



What You'll Need:

Stuff:
-Paper
- 42 or 43 gauge copper wire (very thin)
- Six steel machine screws and nuts
- Neodymium (super strong) magnets or one long bar magnet
- Thin plastic (like that on a cd case) or Thin pieces of wood
- Wax
- Wire
- Solder
- Superglue

Tools/equipment:
-Dremel and dremel accessories
-Screwdriver
-Sewing machine (optional)



step 1.
Make your pattern
There are just a few parts to a pickup, and the bobbin(the thing that holds the coil) is the first thing you need put together. To do this, you'll need to do is make up some kind of pattern for your bobbin. You need one piece for the top and one for the bottom. Look at the pictures and factor . . .

step 2.
Drill holes
Now you need to drill the holes for your post pieces. Before you drill mark where the holes will be, as this isn't exactly something you want to do freehand. Usually the strings on a guitar are about 1cm apart, but check the spacing of the strings to be sure. Also, you'll need to mark two holes . . .

step 3.
Assemble the bobbin
After your bobbin pieces are drilled, you're ready to assemble. First, screw the screws part of the way into the top piece of the bobbin. Then sandwich a spacer of some kind between the top and bottom pieces, as shown in the picture below. I prefer to get the two outside screws and a middle one i . . .

step 4.
Riggin' up a pickup winder
There are a lot of things you can use as a pickup winder. You could use your hands, obviously, but that can be kind of slow and inaccurate. You could also use a drill or electric screwdriver. I chose to use a sewing machine, mainly because it's really easy to rig up and use. On the side of all s . . .

step 5.
Winding
Pickups are made using very thin copper wire, 42 or 43 gauge. I would recommend buying your wire in a spool to make the winding easier, but you can find this kind of wire in other objects if you want. For example, I found mine in a pair of old dog clippers. However, just a slight warning, the win . . .

step 6.
Soldering
Once you're done winding your coil, you need to solder the lead wires. Before you can solder though, you need to scrape the reddish coating off of the wire that is wrapped around the two holes on the bottom piece of the bobbin. You can use very fine sandpaper, your fingernail, or the end of a l . . .

step 7.
Potting the pickup
Potting or saturating a pickup with wax is done to help keep the wires in the coil in place and prevent the pickup from becoming microphonic. I used Gulf Wax (candle wax) to saturate my pickup because it was available, but you could also use a mixture of 80% candle wax and 20% beeswax. Melting . . .

step 8.
Finishing Touches
There are just a couple more things left to do! After your pickup has totally cooled from the potting process, you can put the magnets on your pickup. The magnets you need are called neodymium magnets(they are also known as power magnets, or super strong magnets). When you put them on you have . . .

step 9.
It Is Time!
This is the crude rig I use to test my pickups since I don't have a spare guitar to ruin. Also on this page is a picture of another pickup I made . . .