Making your own pickups

Winding your own pickups is certainly possible; there are no secrets behind this art, as the opened Schaller bass pickup or the disassembled DiMarzio humbucker show. The latter has a magnet polarized across its width that is on both sides in contact with six tiny 5mm (3/16")-diameter, 16mm (5/8")-long allen screws, which serve as adjustable magnetic poles. The flat magnet shown is too narrow and has therefore had a small piece of soft iron attached. The two bobbins are fastened to the brass base from the underside by means of the four tiny screws shown. See next page for details of the dimensions of this humbucker with five leads: two on either side for connecting the coils and the fifth for the connection to the metal grounding plate.

If you intend to make your own pickup, compare the cost of the wire and the magnets with that of a finished pickup first. My personal experiences with winding my own pickups are quite positive.

Magnets

Getting hold of suitable magnets can prove difficult, and I regret that I cannot offer much help there, either. True, there are a lot of magnet manufacturers, but they normally accept large-quantity orders only. One idea would be to use magnets and bobbins of pickups that no longer work, if you can get them.

Flat magnets polarized across their width, however, are very difficult to obtain in small numbers. On my hunt for magnets, I came across the pickup manufacturer Kent Armstrong. He also sells magnets and was kind enough to send me two pairs of them (which I used for the P-90 pickups shown later) for free. Another source for such flat magnets may be Allparts (see supplier addresses).

If you find it too difficult to obtain suitable magnets, you can always improvise. Instead of placing a magnet polarized across its width between the two coils of a humbucker, you can also mount one flat, vertically-polarized magnet under each of the two coils, or you can use six short bar magnets as shown on the facing page. If you place the magnets so that the south pole of one and the north pole of the other faces the top, you don't need the more-difficult-to-obtain magnet polarized across its width. Thicker flat magnets increase the height of the pickup but are easier to get hold of. Small bar magnets that are inserted directly into the coil are relatively easy to find. There are, however, also unpolarized magnets available. In fact, many pickup manufacturers do not polarize the magnets until these have been fitted. To do this, they use extremely powerful magnets or special magnetizers with large capacitors which are capable of giving off a short-lasting, high-voltage electric impulse.

Wire gauges

Most original pickups are wound with 42 AWG (American Wire Gauge) wire. Especially for winding smaller coils 43 AWG or even thinner wire is sometimes used, although less commonly, as the total d.c. resistance of thinner wire is extremely high.

high, thus making the pickup sound less clear. When winding your own pickup success literally hangs by a thread. I wound my first few pickups with 0.036mm wire - not because I needed a challenge, but because a shop-assistant had erroneously sold it to me as 0.06mm (AWG 42) wire, and I continued to use it until the day I checked the gauge. Since I managed to successfully wind a few pickups without making a considerably thinner wire break, I now dare say that with a bit of care it is “almost impossible” to make the “right-gauge” and comparatively thick wire that I use now snap.

When making my first home-made pickup, I wound each of the six magnets individually because I could not imagine that winding around an uneven bobbin could possibly work well. Meanwhile I have tried both methods and would recommend winding around all the magnets or, on split pickups, around one half of the magnets and then around the other half. This method works very well, saves time and also saves you from potential mistakes as you don't need to solder the individual windings together. Winding a single-coil guitar pickup the way I first did would take you about six times longer than with the method I would recommend now.

Pickup covers

Your self-wound pickup will look like a piece of professional work with a commercially-available cover on top of it. Such covers and the screws and springs needed for mounting them are available as spare parts. Make the bobbin so that it matches the cover and fits in tight. But of course you can also make your own pickup cover out of some pieces of pretty wood.