Homebrew guitar pickup winder

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I'm a bit on the fence if this actually counts as a handmade item. If nothing else, I figure it fits right in with Vsalon's over the top, no stone unturned ethos.

Inspired by @VertigoCycles' guitar and amp builds, I'm sharing my recent guitar hobby project. I designed, printed, and assembled a semi-automatic guitar pickup winder.

For those unfamiliar with the construction of guitar pickups, they're pretty simple. Many (5,000+) turns of very thin (42awg - 44awg) copper wire are coiled around a plastic bobbin. In the case of Gibson style pickups, a bar magnet is placed below the coils. When steel guitar strings move in the magnetic field a current is induced in the coil and can be sent to an amp.

I drew up the design in Fusion 360:


The bobbin will be mounted to the disc in the rear. The off axis cylinder on the left is a cam that will rotate and push the traverse bar (near horizontal bar) back and forth to guide the wire back and forth across the bobbin. The limit bar (distant horizontal bar) will allow me to use collars to limit the wire travel so I'm only winding on the bobbin. The three grey blocks on the right are displays for wind plate RPM, wind count, and traverse cam RPM.

I designed it to print in three sections, the winder enclosure on the right, the traverse motor enclosure on the left, and the middle section in the middle.

After catching a few errors and redesigning, the final product looks something like this:




I wasn't clever enough to figure out how to do the math to design a cam that moved exactly like I wanted right off the bat. I ended up just printing and evolving the design bit by bit. After a while I stopped including the part of the design that held the magnets for the traverse cam speed sensor, just so I could print cam designs faster. Wouldn't you know it, it was lucky cam number 13 that was good enough to keep.


The cam design isn't perfect, but the coil comes out reasonably even. At this point, I'd rather spend the time to design and build version 2.0 with stepper motors and Arduino control than continue to spend time tweaking the cam shape. The old Gibson factory mechanical winders didn't wind perfectly either, so I figure I'm in good company.

I'm tensioning the wire by hand. You can see that the edges of the bobbin are slightly warped. That shows that I was putting too much tension on there. I have some ideas for a mechanically controlled tensioner. I've left a notch cut out in the middle section of the winder to allow me to clip it in place.

Here's a coil all wound up, waiting for it's partner to be wound:


Here's a short video showing an early iteration of the machine in action:


By logging the wind plate speed and cam speed, I can estimate the number of turns per layer. If something sounds good, I can check my notes and rebuild the same pickup again in the future. When winding entirely by hand, I wasn't able to be very consistent. Imagine winding up a ball of yarn; you'll never do it the same way twice.