| By :
Eduardo Munroe
As a keen guitar player and somebody who has dabbled in building guitars for many years, the urge to make my first guitar pickup was overwhelming. For those of you who don't know, guitar pickups are to a guitar what a mic is to a singer. Quite simply, it's an easy method of allowing the guitar to be electronically amplified. I collated everything I possibly could from the web and a range of books, and with my experience in customising electric guitars I was prepared to take on the task. As my guitar is a Les Paul type I'll be creating a humbucker type pickup instead of the single coil pickups found on most Fender guitars. The very first thing I needed to undertake was to come up with all of the guitar pickup parts needed for the building procedure. Thankfully a UK pickup provider offered every part I required for my project. Lovely! The second thing I needed to do was to produce a very basic pickup winding machine. Basically whatever electronically spins and permits control of the speed can be utilised at the centre of your pickup winder. A basic motor or your old electric drill will suffice with some customisation. I went for the drill method which I secured inside a wooden structure. It's also crucial that you include some sort of digital or mechanical counter to add up the rotations as the number of turns is vital to the output of the completed pickup. I made use of a simple reed switch along with a digital counter which functioned flawlessly. I am unable to go into the building of the machine in this article but suffice to say that it was very easy. There are numerous articles and video tutorials on the web on the subject. At the heart of the pickup are two plastic bobbins which will accommodate 5000 turns each of 42 AWG wire. This wire is as fine as a real hair and therefore calls for practice to handle and spin. After the bobbins are spun they require thin jump leads to be soldered to the beginning and end of each coil. One of the bobbins has 6 steel slugs pushed in the holes and the other has 6 pole screws added. The completed bobbins are then installed on a metal baseplate and soldered where necessary. There is an Alnico 5 magnet inserted between the bobbins and the base in addition to a maple spacer and keeper bar. Once everything is screwed and soldered in place it was time to try my creation, and to my amazement, I had a fantastic sounding pickup. I've clearly whizzed through the process and yes, I did make a couple of errors that needed correction, but I have to say how rewarding it was. Now I'm prepared for my 2nd effort.
|
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.articlesbacklink.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
