As promised, here are a ton of photos showing how I made my humbucker pickups:
This is my homemade bobbin winder. On the left you can see a spool of 42 gauge, poly-nylon insulated wire.
Another view, which shows the bobbin attached to the winder with double-stick tape. You can also see my simple pedometer/reed switch counter.
This bobbin got around 4ooo turns of coil wire.
After removing the bobbin from the winder, I wrapped the coil with some bobbin tape and soldered the lead wires to the start and finish of the coil. I use different colored leads so I’d know which was the start and finish.
Here I’m using a multimeter to check the DC resistance of the bobbin. If the readout were blank, I’d have a dead bobbin. However, all 4 of my bobbins checked out nicely.
Next, I wound up the coil wire and leads to the bobbin. Then I wrapped another layer of bobbin tape to protect the coil wire from the solder joints.
Then, I inserted the screws and slugs.
The screw bobbin got a spacer attached to the bottom.
I use 4 core wire, which has a bare gound wire that needs to be soldered to the baseplate. Notice how I routed the wire through the baseplate.
In order for a humbucker to work well in pairs, I needed to determine the direction of the polarity. I used a compass and marked the north and south sides.
The magnet was centered on the baseplate so the south side would contact the screw bobbin.
Both bobbins are attached to the baseplate with small screws.
After attaching the slug bobbin, I soldered the leads to the appropriate pickup wire. I use Seymour Duncan color codes to keep the wiring straight.
After the wires were soldered, I used heat-shrink tubing to protect the joints. Then, I tucked the wires into the space between the bobbins.
Then, I wrapped the bobbins with some cloth tape.
Both pickups got a 20 minute bath in a mixture of parafin and beeswax. This step helps to reduce microphonic feedback.
Both pups are ready to install.
Next, I’ll install the pups, wire everything up and see how the Caractacus sounds. Stay tuned!