Making guitar pickups

In this post I’ll show you how I made my own electric guitar pickups for my DIY telecaster.

Also see: Making a Telecaster Guitar on my bedroom floor

Get the wire

I got two 250g reels of polyester dual coat enamel round winding wire from Brocott.co.uk.
I used 43AWG on the Neck pickup and 42AWG on the bridge.
This stuff is really thin and it snaps very easily.

Prepare the flatwork

The pickup consists of six ALMICO magnets that sit between two pieces of fibre flatwork (top and bottom), plus a copper base plate underneath. I bought all of these from Stewmac, here: http://www.stewmac.com/

Construct the pickup

I used a hammer wrapped in an old t-shirt to press the magnets tightly into the flatwork. I took care to get all the magnets straight and parallel with each other.

Ready to wind

Here’s the assembled neck and bridge pickup bobbin

One more (optional) step before winding

I read that a common fault on the old Telecaster pickups was to do with the windings shorting out on the magnet pole pieces. So I painted the magnets with nail varnish to prevent any possible shorts.

Start winding

I threaded a good few loops of wire through the eyelet on the flatwork and started winding… and winding…and winding

Wind the pickup

Fill the bobbin

I aimed to fill the bobbins as much as I could and then take wire off to get the desired winding resistance.
I wound to these DC resistances: Neck: 6.93KOhm and bridge: 7.4KOhm. In general, the more windings, the higher the output but at the cost of rolling off the higher frequencies. This is probably why the bridge is usually of higher resistance than the neck – to roll off some of the high end.

Attach wires

I soldered cloth covered wire to the metal eyelets of the pickups

Pot the pickups

I decided to pot the pickups in wax to prevent any possible microphonic feedback from the vibrations of the guitar and amp. I used a normal candle and melted it on the hob.

Dip the pickups

I submerging the whole of the pickups until all the air from them escaped – about 15 minutes.

Two complete pickups

Two freshly made pickups waiting to be fitted. They looked a lot neater once the wax had dried. I used some neodymium disk magnets (from Ebay) to magnetise the pickups. A few passes did the job fine.

The result

The result is the exact sound I was hoping for. I fitted them to my DIY Telecaster and I’m really happy with the sound, and the range of sound – from harsh and twangy to warm and rounded.

See the Telecaster post to see them on the guitar: Making a Telecaster Guitar on my bedroom floor

Resources

I found the tdpri Telecaster forum is a great resource for all things DIY and Telecaster: http://tdpri.com/forum/

This page is very useful to learn about pickup construction: Learn about guitar pickups

To buy the wire (UK): Brocott.co.uk

To buy the flatwork and other pickup components: http://stewmac.com/