Are there any true handwound pick ups?

RaymondLin

I mean all these boutiques pick ups that advertised as handwound, what does it mean?

do they hold a bobbin with the left hand and wound it 7k turns with the right hand?

or does it mean they place a bobbin on a spinner machine that counts to exactly 7k and press a button using their hands they take it off the machine?

or somewhere in the middle where they turn some gearing like a manual coffee grinder but all the tension and back and forth is set by the machine.

what is handwound pick ups exactly? Or is it all advertising rubbish?

ICBM

RaymondLin said:

or somewhere in the middle where they turn some gearing like a manual coffee grinder but all the tension and back and forth is set by the machine.

The other way round - the machine does the turning of the bobbin, the hands supply the guidance and tension of the wire going on.

andy_k

There's hand wound, which is probably machine wound, but guided by hand, as opposed to fully machine wound which would be more uniform. There is also 'hand made' which is probably what most boutique pickup makers try to sell.

PhilKing

Zhangbucker Pure Handwound are.  I have a set of his strat and the tones are really pure and piano like.  Here's what he says about them:

Handwound vs. Pure Handwound
There is a lot of confusion out there about what exactly constitutes a “handwound” pickup.  There may be some disagreements out on the fringes of the winder community, but at least 90% of us consider a pickup handwound if the traverse of the wire back and forth on the spinning bobbin is hand-guided.  It is still a handwound pickup if the bobbin is turned by machine.  In fact, hand-guided/machine-turned is no subtype or exception; it is the essence of handwound.  Probably 99.999% of handwound pickups are made with machine turned bobbins.  Anyway, by this definition, ALL of my pickups are handwound.  

NOTE:  Pure Handwound is now available in all my pickups -- humbucker and single coils -- however, on minihumbuckers, the DCR spec will be higher because a narrower wire gauge has to be used.

But I have a line of humbuckers that falls into that .001%.  My Pure Handwound line differs from my regular wind in that the wire is wrapped on the bobbin ENTIRELY BY HAND.   There is no machine used to turn the bobbin or anything else other than a clamp to hold the bobbin in place – my hands and the wire are the only moving parts.  It’s a lot of work but the sound difference is worth it.  The regular wind has great dynamics, harmonics, sparkle, clarity and detail, and is very sensitive to height and polepiece adjustments.  The Pure Handwound significantly magnifies all these qualities and somehow even adds some sustain to the mix.  The string separation is as good as it gets, which means you can strum a Pure Handwound neck pickup as hard as you want, mud-free.  Faked double-leads, like when you play southern rock but you’re the only guitar player in the band, sound almost like two separate guitars.  (I probably should have called them Hand Wrapped instead of Pure Handwound, but it's too late now.)
​
I’d like to pretend I’ve studied all this in a lab with oscilloscopes and I could give you charts and graphs explaining it all, but I really have no idea why this works.  It just does. I got the idea from opening up a Timbucker a few years ago and discovering a wind pattern that to my mind could only have been laid on the bobbin by hand.  A machine turned bobbin couldn’t have created this pattern, what I call the crop circle of wind patterns.  Tim White, creator and purveyor of Timbuckers, has since called it quits and I’ve never talked to him about whether he did in fact lay the wire on by hand or otherwise independently verified that he did.  But hand-wrapping would explain why his waiting list was nearly 2 years by the end (hand wrapping takes a lot of time).  I also make no claim to be able to duplicate his pattern – I still don’t know how he did it.  

What I do know is that, like his method, whatever it was, my hand-wrapping technique also creates patterns that can’t be duplicated with a machine turned bobbin and the results are extremely close to his, especially in terms of clarity, dynamics, detail and string separation, mine sounding maybe a touch smoother on top than his.  

I strongly recommend your Pure Handwound be made with no cover because even the best covers shunt some of the PH magic to ground.  Plus it’ll save you the cost of the cover.  There are some covers that I can at least live with (RS Guitarworks aged covers, raw covers, and ThroBak) but even they have a bit of an effect.  It's not always a bad thing, sometimes a cover can help tame the icepick in the bridge.  But it's always a detriment, however slight, in the neck.

DefaultM

“I’d like to pretend I’ve studied all this in a lab with oscilloscopes and I could give you charts and graphs explaining it all, but I really have no idea why this works.  It just does“

DefaultM

Unlike the photo I just tried to post. It was Duncan Bannatyne. He's out.

RaymondLin

Is it me that I prefer machine wound for accuracy? Handwound 5k, 7k or 10k turns sounds like a recipe for mistakes and uneven tension or wraps, may be that’s character?! But surely that’s undesirable when you are doing it, otherwise just close your eyes when doing it if you want to introduce errors on purpose.  

thegummy

Entrepreneurialism - if you can't improve a product or create a new one, create a new marketing gimmick for an old one.

ICBM

RaymondLin said:

Is it me that I prefer machine wound for accuracy? Handwound 5k, 7k or 10k turns sounds like a recipe for mistakes and uneven tension or wraps, may be that’s character?! But surely that’s undesirable when you are doing it, otherwise just close your eyes when doing it if you want to introduce errors on purpose.  

I would also 'expect' to prefer a super-accurate machine wind with no uneven overlaps, and it is possible to make them - but when pickups are made like that they end up sounding dull and lifeless. There is an actual physics reason for this, it's because that maximises the internal capacitance of the winding by minimising the separation between the winds. In practice, scatter-wound pickups just sound better.

Although now, it's perfectly possible to programme a computerised winding machine to make repeatable scatterwound coils that reproduce a hand winding but are all exactly the same, so you can have the best of both worlds.

lasermonkey

I used to make the 1000:6 turn transformers at my previous job, completely by hand. Not a task I miss, that's for sure!

fretfinder

Usually marketing gimmicks are little effort from the company for a lot of benefit. Genuine hand-winding sounds like a lot of effort for little benefit! 

Balrog68

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure the 7k refers to the resistance (in ohms) of the pick up... Not 7000 turns. 

monquixote

Balrog68 said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure the 7k refers to the resistance (in ohms) of the pick up... Not 7000 turns. 

Yes, you could easily get a length of wire with the required resistance and then wind it until it runs out.

You don't have to count winds.

stickyfiddle

IIRC a typical vintage Strat has approx 8,000 winds, so anything hotter would generally be more (all things being equal, which obviously they aren't). I guess thicker wire would reduce that a bit in whichever pickups use thicker wire. But still, it's several thousand either way

pintspiller

Gordon Smith
CSGuitars

Henrytwang

I’ve never believed that anyone can make consistent sounding hand guided scatter wound pickups,  I’ve had both very good and quite mediocre pickups from certain hand winders there’s bound to be some variability. Perhaps a range of different computer guided scatter wound pickups would be a good idea.

rossi

I found that  completely consistent industrial winding in the 60's at Plesseys and Thorns  was a  total no go .If complete consistency was required it was done the easy way .You chucked out the ones out of spec at the QC stage .I used to set the machines up and later was the line supervisor .I worked in a  factory  with  500 women with at least 50 of them nubile miniskirted  Essex girls  ,in the days when they were slim ,not fat lipped plastic  tarts ,so coil winding was not very often my top priority .Even so I  did manage to keep the factories going with coils that did their job.Most of what I read about coil winding is mainly fluff and puff .Its never been a black art just wire on a former and mainly a wide spec.

CasperCaster

If I remember correctly Fletcher pickups in Birmingham winds his pickups by hand guiding the wire onto the coil/former, but rather than a motor the latter is spun using man power - I'm not sure if it is pedal (cycle) driven, or a treadle or what! Wind pickups and keep fit! 

Moleman

ICBM said:

RaymondLin said:

Is it me that I prefer machine wound for accuracy? Handwound 5k, 7k or 10k turns sounds like a recipe for mistakes and uneven tension or wraps, may be that’s character?! But surely that’s undesirable when you are doing it, otherwise just close your eyes when doing it if you want to introduce errors on purpose.  

I would also 'expect' to prefer a super-accurate machine wind with no uneven overlaps, and it is possible to make them - but when pickups are made like that they end up sounding dull and lifeless. There is an actual physics reason for this, it's because that maximises the internal capacitance of the winding by minimising the separation between the winds. In practice, scatter-wound pickups just sound better.

Although now, it's perfectly possible to programme a computerised winding machine to make repeatable scatterwound coils that reproduce a hand winding but are all exactly the same, so you can have the best of both worlds.

Programming a computerised winding machine to make reliably repeatable scatterwound coils that aim to reproduce the best of hand guided winding is exactly what Declan at Deacci Pickups in NI (formerly RD Pickups for those with longer memories) has been working on for about ten years. The RD Pickups were handwound so Declan is in the position to know the differences. I’ve got sets of both handwound (RD) and machine scatterwound (Deacci) and both sound superb and every bit as good as the other boutique brands on my other guitars (Lollar, Fralin, Bare Knuckle, Manlius):

 https://www.deacci.com/

Maybe the OP should repost his question in Oil City Pickups thread for Ash’s take on it all?