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Re: Pickup makers annoy me!

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11/17/2002 5:30 PM

Re: Pickup makers annoy me!

Haven't been here in a while, on the road too much in my day job.
On Alnico III, or anything other than Alnico V, it's strictly a custom order situation. 500 pieces seems to be necessary, although I haven't personally yet tried to push that envelope. I got some nice Alnico II bar magnets from Master Magnetics a while back, excellent quality and price. Jason did the same thing with Alnico V, he told me, I imagine because he couldn't get a decent quantity break from Allparts and everyone else's are Korean/Chinese wrong dimensions. We just exchanged 30 of each as a matter of fact.

On the more general topic of secrecy, it does indeed cut two ways. For myself, I don't mind revealing wire types (insulation) and ga., DC R, H & C, for example. I have published pics of my 12 VDC winder on mimf and described its design, construction and basic operation.
However, I generally don't reveal things like bobbin speed, scatterwinding speed, and no. of turns, although I keep records so I can duplicate an item fairly closely. This is important as I do mostly wholesale work. I found the best way to learn is to build and wholesale forces you to build lots! The price isn't great but like SK I still have a day job.
For example, I learned winding Strats how to get all those different funky looking coil profiles you see in the old hand guided ones. Most of them are caused by winding with the bobbin slightly off-center, in one plane or the other. You very soon find out that scatterwinding to one side of the bobbin gives that characteristic S-shaped coil end profile. And so, on and on. I am nowhere near as experienced as some of the folks on this forum, but I have now built well over 100 pups and sold most of them, so I must be doing something right!

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