dismantling a pickup.

  • Thread starter Thread starter VomitHatSteve
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VomitHatSteve

VomitHatSteve

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I'm trying to build a single-coil pickup from scratch.

A friend gave me an old 1st Act pickup he had lying around so I could cannibalize it for the wire, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to dismantle it.

I managed to get the plastic shell removed, but the rest of it seems to be glued together or something. Has anyone done this before? Any ideas how to get this thing apart?

Thanks.
 
On the one hand, I really want to say 'If ya' gotta ask.......'
Seriously, it may be potted in wax, which might act like a binder or glue. The idea was to keep the coil from being too loose, vibrating and acting microphonic. I might leave it alone, and use it as a reference. Not a very good reference, but a reference none the less. If you can, measure the DC resistance of the coil. Measure the inductance. Now build your own and find out how it compares to even a lowly First Act single coil. When I tried to wind my own coil, I first used a record player. It took forever, and was not as tight as a factory pickup. My pickup very microphonic. You have to learn to add tension to the coil when you wind, and it will snap maybe 912 times before you get it right. You are using a 42 gauge wire, which is basically 1-ohm per foot for resistance. A typical Strat pickup will have roughly 6,000 feet of wire. That's how much fun you are in for. Even after 100 tries, the best I got my own hand-wound pickup to measure was 5K, or better than 80% of a factory pickup. Not bad, but nowehere near perfect.
For cheap money, get a 'kit' from Stewart MacDonald. $11.25 gets you all the pickup parts, and $30 gets you enough wire to wind 6 Strat pickups. Without a winder, you may get one good pickup for that $41.25! Cheap fun? Maybe.
 
Pickup Wire



Seriously, there is absolutely no reason to try to salvage pickup wire (particularly off a crappy pickup). Though I suppose I should mention, I see absolutely no reason to build your own pickups - there are a lot of extremely good, very reasonably priced pickups on the market.

And yes, the pickup you have is mostly likely potted in wax. You could try to melt it off, but that sure seems like a waste of time and effort to me. Just buy new wire. It's not like it's all that expensive.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Light said:
Pickup Wire



Seriously, there is absolutely no reason to try to salvage pickup wire (particularly off a crappy pickup). Though I suppose I should mention, I see absolutely no reason to build your own pickups - there are a lot of extremely good, very reasonably priced pickups on the market.

And yes, the pickup you have is mostly likely potted in wax. You could try to melt it off, but that sure seems like a waste of time and effort to me. Just buy new wire. It's not like it's all that expensive.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
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I believe he wants to build something that is not standard. He posted about a guitar with a mix of bass strings and normal a while back.

Having said that I agree that cannibalising isn't the way to go. The parts for pickup building are cheap and relatively easy to come by. The expensive bit is time planning and gearing up to wind them. I have wound my own in the past and will do again when required.

My advice is to do a lot of research first as although the principle of pickup winding is simple the devil is in the detail. With a few more details of what you are hoping to achieve we may be able to help a bit more.
 
I would add that if you are serious about it I can post some details of my setup which I built for winding pickups. It's buried at the moment because I haven't used it in a while but it is possible to rig up an effective machine quite easily. There is lots of info on the web about it for those interested.

In the meantime if you have a bunch of lego lying around.;)
 
His pickup may be bedded with epoxy. Some companies do that.

Another reason not to cannabalize an old pickup for wire is the likelihood that the insulation will fail when rewinding. The insulation is soft, becomes brittle over time, and is easily damaged with handling. You run a very high risk of completing your project and, if it works at all, having poor sound quality. You would not be able to tell whether the cause was a partial short or a design flaw.

Good luck to you
 
I used to live pretty close to the shop where they make Rio Grande pickups, and I wandered in there one day and saw how they "mantled" the pickups, and that day made up my mind to never try to dismantle one - but good luck :)

But if you're willing to take the risk, why not?

Winding one of those suckers would take *forever* by hand, it seems to me.
 
Yup. This is for that exact same instrument. It's probably more about building the pickup than getting good sound out of it. (So far, it's ceramic magnets glued to a popsicle stick, so I don't have high expectations for sound quality.)

In some ways, since this is meant to be the most "punk" guitar ever, bad tone is a good thing! :D
(For similar DIY ethic reasons, $30 for wire would probably be out of budget!)

So if it is epoxied, is there an easy way to get it apart? I haven't really worked with epoxy before.

That Lego winder is one of the coolest things I've ever seen!
 
VomitHatSteve said:
So if it is epoxied, is there an easy way to get it apart? I haven't really worked with epoxy before.
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IF it's epoxied there's absolutely no way that you're gonna be able to get that wire off except in little pieces.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Yup. This is for that exact same instrument. It's probably more about building the pickup than getting good sound out of it. (So far, it's ceramic magnets glued to a popsicle stick, so I don't have high expectations for sound quality.)

In some ways, since this is meant to be the most "punk" guitar ever, bad tone is a good thing! :D
(For similar DIY ethic reasons, $30 for wire would probably be out of budget!)

So if it is epoxied, is there an easy way to get it apart? I haven't really worked with epoxy before.

That Lego winder is one of the coolest things I've ever seen!
Click to expand...

Whatever you do I really think your going to have to bite the bullet and get some clean wire. The simple reason being that it must be insulated along it's entirely length. One short in amongst all those windings and the thing just isn't going to work. It's unlikey to be epxied but if it is you haven't got a prayer of getting useful wire from it. It's more likely wax potted in which case really hot water may soften it. The guy who does my rewinds has a set up just for that but he uses a mix of stuff to clean the wax off. I'm really not sure what as I don't get involved in rewinds as it is a very specialised task.

I just had a brief shimmy through all my bookmarks on "interesting" guitar stuff that I seem to collect on my browsing travels and this is a good article on building a pickup using very basic parts and tools. He does a pretty good job of it.
 
You're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.You must have a lot of time on your hands.
At very least,get new wire,if someone suggests using the old stuff,they're just trying to get a few laughs at your expense.
 
ocnor said:
Nope! If it's coated with epoxy you're screwed.
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Oh no! It's not the wire itself that's epoxied. The pickup has two coils that are glued side-by-side. I haven't been able to separate them to get at the wire.

If I can get to it, I'd like to try the used wire. If nothing else, I'd think it'd be good practice. My first (well... second I built one with uncoated wire a few weeks back) attempt probably won't be very successful anyway, so I might as well practice with the scrap wire.
 
acidrock said:
You're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.You must have a lot of time on your hands.
At very least,get new wire,if someone suggests using the old stuff,they're just trying to get a few laughs at your expense.
Click to expand...
Like, man, that vintage wire is just so mojfied! :D
 
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