What about wire tension? Wire tension is INCREDIBLY important when winding pickups. I wish the user explained that aspect of the project.

I wind pickups on an old sewing machine right now, but would love to go to something more automated if I could get the wire tension figured out.

@hoooooooooooorj:

If you’re winding your pickup on a sewing machine, you could probably reroute your wire through the main thread tensioner on the machine (usually a numbered dial), which is quite adjustable. I’m not sure if the tension discs in the machine would damage your wire’s insulation, but I doubt it. Circles of felt, or teflon washers, could fix any problems you might have with the tensioner possibly damaging your insulation.

I’ve seen a few people make machines much more simple than this (think hand powered drill and simple magnetic counter, supposedly you could also use this to wind transformers, right?

i so wish i had the money and the time to make this…

It might be worthwhile to have the reset button display the number of turns completed before the reset button was hit. That would allow a user to resume after a reset. Another feature that might be nice would be a “turns done from this spool” count, which would let a user determine how many turns they get per spool and approximate how many turns are left.

Bravo! Bravo! Can you sell me one of those pickups? They sound good! I need one for an old counterfeit import Jazzmaster… lkuhl81@gmail

Just bookmarked this post for the comments alone. Cheers to the builder and the commenters for the excellent feedback. Can’t wait to finish my Arduino powered winder and get flamed to hell. ;)

Wire-wrap not used any more? You must be Joking!

I use wire-wrap almost every day. Rant…

You can take a bunch of leaded components, resistors, caps, transistors, even DIP IC’s and DIRECTLY wire-wrap the parts together quickly to make a circuit “blob” WITHOUT a soldering iron anywhere in-sight!

This is space-wired stuff, no perforated proto-board (strip-board, Vero-board) needed. Changing/adding/removing components only means wrapping/un-wrapping. NO soldering.

If you need to hold the leaded components (yes you can solder leads on SMT parts too) on a substrate but don’t have a perforated board handy, just push them through a piece of cardboard and then wrap the circuit directly on the leads. This has been done for ages – nothing new (I’m old enough to know).

I would be dead in terms of FAST prototype without my wire-wrap/unwrap/strip tool (around $5 USD) with my thousand-foot spool of good wire-wrap wire bought long ago (surplus, Singapore, less than $20 USD).

0.1″ perf-board is cheap, wire-wrap tools are cheap, wire-wrap wire is cheap (hunt), wire-wrap sockets/headers are cheap. Wire-wrap should be one of your first considerations when prototyping!

At high frequencies a leaded-part wire-wrap “blob” will often out-perform anything on a PCB unless the PCB is very carefully designed. (Ground planes, layered ground planes, Parasitics!) When you wire-wrap a board just keep the wires at 90-degree angles, cross-talk solved. Use a strip-board with a single grounding point land. Don’t think wire-wrap is only for low-frequency low-speed prototyping.

Rgds, Drone

I actually made one like this in 9th grade, but simpler, out of a Lego NXT kit.
http://students.hthcv.hightechhigh.org/~cbarland/9th%20Grade/Guitar%20page.html
It’s at the bottom of the page… excuse the large slow load time, I made the page in 9th grade.
It was for a class project, we were making electric guitars and we were having a hard time winding out magnet-and-cardboard pickups.
I hooked the microcontroller up to a 9-volt adapter and plugged it into the wall so that the batteries wouldn’t die constantly.
It also had a winding guide that distributed the wire across the face of the magnet.