Dan Armstrong Replica Part 5

Sorry for the delay in updates. 

I have been quite pleasantly surprised by this project, which is a testament to either my notable guitar-building skill or my pronounced lack of self-esteem.

Perhaps both.

I’ve never take the easy way out of anything, and habitually choose the more difficult path.  I always said it was just my nature.

My mother always said “You’re f@#$ing retarded.”

It’s not intentional, I promise. The easy way just looks booby-trapped.

What can I say?

So as we’ve gotten to the home stretch with this build, I had to make a decision. 

Dan Armstrongs have one pickup, and they are unique.

They don’t look like regular pickups. They’re larger, they’re made differently and they’re attached differently, both to the guitar and to the rest of the wiring harness. 

You can buy original, vintage pickups on eBay.

If you want to pay US$400.

You can buy reissue pickups.

Or, if you like to challenge yourself, you can make your own pickup.

Maybe I just like to challenge myself. 

Or maybe my mother was right.

What is a pickup, you ask? Pickups are like microphones for guitar strings. Pickups, very simply, are steel pole pieces with magnets surrounded by copper coils which are wound on bobbins. 

So if I wanted to make my own pickup, I would need some steel, some magnets, some bobbins, and some copper wire. 

Which are easily found and purchased online.

But those copper coils have about 5,000-8,000 turns on them.

That’s a lot of turns. 

So I would need a machine to wind the wire onto the bobbin.

You can buy pickup winding machines.

For a lot of money.

Or you can go to Sham Shui Po and buy an old sewing machine motor.

And a dimmer switch.

You can go on eBay and buy a mechanical counter.

You can also buy a microswitch (or 5, since you know you’re likely to hose one or more of them up).

You can build a small enclosure for all the parts.

You can wire them together (after getting invaluable help from people on the internet).

You can cut out a Plexiglas disc with one side flattened and position the microswitch so that the flat portion activates the switch once for each rotation.

You can have your own pickup winder. 

The counter is necessary because you need an exact (or nearly exact) number of turns to reach the resistance you need to get the sound you want. So it’s important to be very accurate.

This counter works well at lower speeds, but I expect to be winding slowly for the first few pickups, so for now it is more than adequate for my needs.

The disc spins pretty well, but it’s not absolutely true (meaning it wobbles a little bit). Eventually I will commission an aluminum version with a set screw, but for now I think this will do.

I only got about 150 winds into this before the wire broke, but I was just seeing if it worked.

It does.

That wire is 42AWG. It’s thinner than human hair. And not as strong.

I need to make a traverse control, but I am well on my way to winding my own pickup.