The sound, as intended, is thicker and with more muscle than from pups with AlNiCo rods, partially due to the extra turns of wire, partially due to the magnets. The highs are still bright but maybe a bit less shrill than with traditional pickups. I'm not saying I prefer these to the traditional ones, I love those too and have wound some sets with AlNiCo5 slugs. These are just different. This what they are made of:
Single coil pickups with neodymium button magnets, forbon bobbin top & bottom, steel polepieces: neck pickup 9000 turns AWG 42 wire, 7,0 kΩ, middle pickup 9500 turns AWG 42 wire, 7.2 kΩ, bridge pickup 9800 turns AWG 42 wire, 7.3 kΩ Middle pickup reverse wound & reverse polarity. Pickups potted in in a mixture of paraffin (80%) and beeswax (20%).
This was not the first set of these pickups I've wound. Sometimes I marry a neck and middle pickup with a "Scumbucker", a humbucker built with the same magnets. Some time ago a wound a set like that and installed it in a friend's guitar. I've also used the same magnets in other pickup types, both for guitar and bass.
I make the bobbin of forbon flatwork and cut polepieces out of 5 mm steel bar. I've bought the flatwork with 52 mm pole spacing from Stewmac, but having trouble finding Strat pickup flatwork with 50 mm spacing I decided to make the neck pickup flatwork myself, with the same kind of forbon sheet they use for factory-made parts.
First I had to make templates out of plywood. I took the measures from a plastic bobbin and sanded the templates down to the right size. I then cut suitable pieces of forbon sheet, fastened them to the templates with double-sided tape and drilled polepiece holes in the sheet. I secured the forbon pieces with two stumps of steel bar and trimmed the edges flush with the template using a table router and a flush trim bit. After I lightly l sanded the edges the flatwork was just what I needed. Just yesterday I used a pair for a set of AlNiCo5-powered pups.
After winding the pickups I potted them in molten wax for 20 minutes, wiped the excess wax off and wound some pickup tape around the coils when they had cooled off. I have some pictures to share, some from the workshop, some from my home studio.
- Here are the templates both for the top and the bottom - and a newly made pair of flatwork.
- Drilling slug holes in the flatwork.
- Trimming the flatwork edges here. I prefer to keep my fingers away from the spinning router bit and use pliers to hold the steel bars securing the forbon sheet.
- Here they are all three, in a studio portrait.