To give credit where it’s due, these two beautiful coils were made by Aero Instruments. They also are the ONLY pictures I’ve found on the internet of a MusicMan Stingray pickup “under the hood”. Since I don’t own one of those pickups I had to base my designs on this picture.

The first thing I did was to purchase a MM pickup cover to give me the proper dimensions of the pickup itself.

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With this I could calculate the length and width of the coils. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find the thickness of the coil anywhere on the net. Even the Musicman forums out there couldn’t help me. Thanks guys L, the problem is that the size of the coil determines the sound that the pickup will have. A tall skinny coil will have a stringy sound while a shorter larger coil will have a warmer sound. I decided to guesstimate the thickness of my coils.

Next step was to buy the components. I needed magnets, magnet wire, vulcanized fibreboard and eyelets. I thought the magnets  were probably going to be the most difficult to find but actually were pretty easily found. I first sent an e-mail to Ampge.com who sells magnets to the pickup rewinding public out there. He didn’t have them and didn’t plan on getting any. What I needed was alnico 5 rods with a diameter of 9mm. The great majority of magnet rods for pickups use 5mm diameter, so I was out of luck. I then googled for magnet manufacturers and found www.intemag.com, I emailed them what I needed and they answered me back with the address and e-mail of my local distributor here in the Netherlands. J They had no problem with my small order of magnets and even cut it to the length I needed, I only had to wait 7 weeks to receive them since their plant is in China.

The vulcanized fibreboard was something else. It is an old paper based material that is getting very hard to find. Since it’s only used for the bobbins and I didn’t want to order 2 square meters of them from the states I got PCB material locally in an electronics shop. The PCB stuff is basically layers of paper epoxied together. It was easy to cut with a hacksaw and file but it is not the most tool-friendly material out there.

The magnet wire, I bought locally. I got wire of 0.05mm diameter. That’s the equivalent of 44 AWG. The actual norm for pickups is 42 AWG on most single coils, some humbuckers will use 43AWG but 44AWG is extremely rare. I didn’t have the money to have a kilo of wire sent from the states or anywhere else and pay an additional 20-30€ of shipping, so I got what I could find and figured we’ll see what the results are like in the end. The 50 gram wire bobbins were 3€ , which were enough to build both my coils.

The eyelets I got from www.mouser.com, they deliver worldwide. The catalog number for the eyelets is; #534-34. I found this link and the catalog number through Jason Lollar’s book “Basic Pickup Winding and Complete Guide to Making Your Own Pickup Winder” 

What I did notice when I got my pickup cover is that the string spacings that Musicman uses are totally different than the ones that were going to end up on my bass. My bridge is a lot narrower than the ones on Stingray basses apparently.

So I made my calculations and proceeded to cut the bobbins. The top left image shows the epoxied paper material with pencils marks where they will be drilled, along with the magnets and magnet wire. The picture at the left shows the bobbin once its been cut, the edges of the bobbins have been bevelled and the bobbin has been assembled.

I taped the magnets with electrical tape to prevent the magnet wire to touch the magnets. From what I’ve read this prevents the coil to short out if the magnets ever become corrugated and eat the insulation off the wire over the course of years to come.

I tried to wind the pickups with my electric drill with a sanding attachment but that was a bad idea. The bobbin of magnet wire was just hanging from a round piece of wood, I was expecting the wire to just roll off the bobbin but it turns out that the wire is way too small to give much strength against the weight of the bobbin. The speed at which the drill went broke the thread right away as soon as I started it. I tried leaving the bobbin on the floor with a lot of wire spooled out of the bobbin but the drill still broke the thread. I had to find another way of winding the pickups.

Not willing to spend too much money on this project I got myself a 14€ hand drill for winding purposes. I had already seen another tutorial on pickup winding on the net where someone used one. That seemed like a good idea. 

I then looked around the house for something that could be used as a sort of wire feeder. I needed to be able to get the magnet wire bobbin out of the bobbin and on the pickup without breaking the thread. Something with ball bearings could have done the trick… and then I saw my tiny lacquer roller lying around LOL.  These things are designed to roll freely. A couple of pushes and the wire bobbin fit exactly in it. I was in business! J

I clamped the drill on my computer desk. The lacquer roller was wedged between two pieces of plywood which were clamped to the desk. Before winding I drilled two small holes on the pickup bobbin to install eyelets later to help soldering all the wires. I then passed the end of the magnet wire through one hole and taped the wire under the bobbin and then taped the bobbin with double-sided tape to the sanding attachment. I made sure that the magnet wire and the pickup bobbin were exactly lined up together to prevent the wire from going off the sides of the pickup as I was winding.

When you start winding you have to take care that the first bit of wire you taped will stay totally flat on the bobbin and out of the way of the subsequent wire that will be wound. It’s very easy to break that one first bit of wire and end up with a useless coil. If that wire is breaks, it usually will at the joint coming out of the coil. All the rest of the wire is completely hidden under the coil, making your coil useless and forcing you to start all over again. Here is the winder at work. With my left hand I guided the wire in the pickup and right hand turned the drill’s handle. You can’t have more handwound than this LOL

What they tell you on pickup building forums is that beginners will break their thread many times and that you’ll have to get used to soldering those tiny wires together very often. Seeing as how those wires are smaller than a human hair it’s not that easy. I got lucky and only broke it twice. The first time was really frustrating. I even had a hard time seeing the wire. They, of course, wouldn’t stand in place properly so I resorted to taping them in place on top of each other at the ends, but facing each other. That was still annoying because they wouldn’t stay in place either or solder nicely. That first solder joint made a big (in comparison to the thickness of the wire) glob of solder on top of the joint. I then sprayed lacquer on that joint to re-insulate the wire and proceeded to wind. It took a good three hundred turns until the ugly bump caused by the big solder joint got lost inside the coil. I got lucky the second time that the wire broke and found the best trick, I think, to re-solder the joint.

The plywood pieces holding the lacquer roller ended up being very useful as a makeshift workbench. I used it to hold the wires while being soldered. As I was saying, I sprayed lacquer to re-insulate the wire the first time it broke, so the second time around I still had lacquer residue on that piece of plywood that was still tacky to the touch. The two bits of wire could be simply superimposed on each other at the ends without anything moving. They would just stick on the lacquer. After doing this I melted just a little bit of solder on the tip of my soldering iron and just lightly stroked the ends of the two wires to leave a very small amount of solder on the wires. The solder joint can be seen on the left where the red arrow is pointing. I sprayed more lacquer to re-insulate, then went on with rewinding.

There’s two ways to wind pickups, one is to wind to “count”, meaning you wind your pickups to a certain amount of turns. Which I believe is the most widely used. To do this you need to use a counter that counts every single turn you do around the bobbin. Once the magical number you want appears on your counter you stop winding. It’s a very simple way of making sure all your pickups are wound exactly to the same amount of turns. The other way is to wind to resistance. You basically measure the resistance of your coil several times as you wind with a multimeter.

 

I looked into finding a counter for winding purposes but had a really hard time finding one so I decided to wind to resistance. I knew I wanted a total resistance of 10K for the humbucker so I wound each coil to 5K. Since the two coils would be connected in series I would end up with a 10K ohm resistance. I just went at it for a while with the first coil. Every time I turned the handle of the drill 100 times I would make a mark on a piece of paper. With one turn of the drill handle, the nose of the drill turned somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2 turns (can’t tell exactly).

 I made 1400 turns of the handle (about 6000 turns on the coil) on the first coil when I decided that should be enough. The coil ended up with 6.71K Ohm resistance. So I made a calculation to see about how many turns I’d need to end up with 5K on the second coil and wound about 1000 turns of the handle on the second coil.
Also, towards the end of the last coil I stopped once in a while and sanded a bit of the wire magnet to take off the poly insulation and checked the resistance of the coil with a multimeter by putting one tip of the multimeter on the beginning wire of the coil and the other tip on the piece of wire that was stripped of the insulation. After doing that I sprayed lacquer on the wire to give it a new coat of insulation as recommended in Jason Lollar's book and went on with winding. The coil was checked several times using this technique until the final resistance was precisely 5.00K Ohm. 

I taped the bobbin on my lacquer roller to the side of the wire bobbin with double-sided tape too. Now when I turned the drill’s handle it would pull the wire away from the coil and onto the roll of tape and roll out freely from the pickup bobbin taped to the lacquer roller. It took about 5 minutes until I was finished. The wire would break once in a while because of the speed I unwound but it was simply a matter of putting the loose wire back on the roll of tape with a bit of scotch tape (5 seconds of work) and  going on with unwinding. I would check the resistance of the coil several times when I’d get closer to the 5K I needed and unwound the last couple of turns by hand until I got exactly 5.00K as an end value.

Now I had the job of de-winding the first coil that was wound to 6.71K Ohm. I went around the house looking for what could be useful to unwind about 1000 turns off the coil and used this. It’s simply a roll of tape that I taped on my drill's sanding attachment with double-sided tape.

 

 

After the pickups were wound like I wanted them, I installed the 2 eyelets on each bobbin and soldered the start and end wire of each bobbin to an eyelet.

 There we are finally, two single coils. Most single coils are made this way, whether you’re making a Strat, Tele, P-bass , J-bass or Musicman Stingray pickup, they all use the same technique. It’s not very surprising since Leo fender designed all of them. The only difference will be of course how the magnets are laid, what type of magnets and what type of wire and final resistance.

 

Making the humbucker.

 

A bit of theory: Alnico magnets have a polarity. There is a south side and a north side to the magnets. You can check the polarity by using a compass. If you point a compass to your magnet, the needle of the compass will be attracted to the opposite side of the magnet. In other words, if the compass points north then it means the magnet in on the south side.

 

A humbucker will cancel the hum that a single coil usually makes because its two coils have opposing polarity on the magnets and the current travels inside the humbucker in opposite direction. It’s usually referred as “RWRP” or reverse wound-reverse polarity. This term confused me a lot in the beginning. I just assumed that I had to wind one coil clockwise and the second coil counter-clockwise. That is simply not true. The current needs to travel in clockwise /counter-clockwise on the two coils. This means you can, and that’s what usually happens, wind the two coils in the same direction but you connect the two coils so the current travels in opposite direction. Here is the final pickup, trimmed on the edges and wired.

I connected the end wire of the south polarity pickup to the white wire and the end wire of the north polarity pickup to the long black wire. The small black wire is connected to the start wires of the two bobbins. This effectively connects the coils in series with the current entering and exiting the coils in opposing clockwise / counter-clockwise directions.   … and this brings us to the end of this tutorial. Bear in mind this is a bass Stingray humbucker, guitar humbuckers are a totally different beast; baseplates, spacers, bar magnets , screws, pole pieces, that’s all too complicated for me ;) If you want to build one of those I’d like to refer you to John Tirone’s wonderful humbucker page and generally amazing website.

 

So how does it sound you ask?

 

Well, first off I was sceptical, I read a lot of sites where people who make a pickup end up saying how absolutely amazing their pickup is and they never could have asked for more and where has this been all of their lives and they're so amazing and blah-blah-blah. Obviously these people were just so happy with their project that they weren’t realist.

I thought that my pickups ended up being very tall and skinny so I wasn’t expecting a great sound out of them. They just looked like 2 strat pickups next to each other, so I assume I’d get a strat-style humbucker for bass with stringy bell-like tones and not too warm.

The other thing is that these were going to be installed in my bass which I just finished building. Since this is my first instrument build how do I know if the sound is good? Could it be the bass that sucks or the humbucker?

So anyway, I used 250K pots for the tone and volume and used a 100nf cap on the tone pot. I used this cap because I read that it lets more bass frequency out than a 47nf cap which are both the norms on basses. I figured it’s a bass after all, so I might as well get the bassiest sound out of it J

And the result? 

This bass and it’s pickup are truly the best sounding, most amazing instrument I’ve ever played! It’s got this big boomy sound and high pitched highs and well-defined mids that are great for everything I would ever want to do! LOL

I was quite shocked with the sound I got, it’s 10 times better than the crappy Ibanez Lo-Z pickups and its preamp in my SR800 and also nicer than the pickups in my Squier P-bass. That's the only reference I can take since i've never owned other basses But I am extremely pleased with those pickups.

 

I recommend building pickups to anyone interested in saving a few bucks and getting a new addiction of a hobby ;)

 

 

Thanks for reading. Comments and tips are welcomed

Philmailloux@yahoo.com