Making a Pickup Cover and
Potting a Pickup
For the wooden pickup cover, I first made a template of the pickup rout in the body with a piece of thick paper that I then transfered onto a piece of olive tree wood that I bought when we drove to the south of France last summer. That wood was so beautiful that I had to bring back enough to build a guitar with. lol
I then routed inside the lines I marked out for the width and lenght of the pickup and also routed an extra lenght to accomodate the magnet pole pieces that stick out of the bobbin at about 2mm until the pickups fit in flush. Once that was done I cut the cover out with a saw.
I then clamped my belt sander on the workbench and shaped the cover by moving it with my hands. After that it was only a matter of drilling the screw holes and lacquering the cover. All of this was about half an hour of work.
Potting the pickup was no big deal either. At first I didn't want to pot the pickup because I heard that not all companies do. I was under the impression that I wound my pickups tightly enough that microphonics wouldn't happen but it didn't turn out that way.
Usually, the norm for potting pickups is to use 80% wax and 20% beeswax. I went the easy way and just took a candle lying around the house and cut it in small pieces until it filled up a small tin can. I melted the wax by puttin the tin can inside a "bain-marie", that basically means that your tin can gets heated up by the water boiling in the pot under it. A good trick to prevent your pickups from touching the hottest part of the pan (the bottom , of course) and ruining your pickups is to put a plate between the pan and the tin can.(IN the water) this way the heat of the pan is not directly transmitted to the tin can and therefore your pickups. I let the pickups soaks for about 10 minutes in the melted wax and took them out and let them dry. After cleaning the pole pieces I was done.