Field Expedient Pickup Winding!

How hard is it to wind a pickup? How will it sound? How do I age the magnets? How do I make a humbucker? These are the kinds of questions we receive daily here at GuitarAttack World Headquarters. Guess what -- it doesn't take exotic winders with tensioning, wire guides, and traversing mechanisms. We decided to show what it takes to rewind a pickup, guerilla style, during a recent business trip. Materials? A Peavey Raptor single coil pickup, a 1/2 pound roll of magnet wire from Stewmac.com, a sewing machine, and some double sided tape. That's it.
A Kenmore sewing machine is the centerpiece of our field-expedient winding activity. We dragged it out of a closet and decided to spin it up. Here is the stripped Peavey bobbin taped to the rotating wheel on the sewing machine. We stripped the wire with a razor knife and cleaned the Chinese bobbin with naphtha, a.k.a. lighter fluid. Note: This pickup is not made like a Fender pickup. You can see that the pole pieces are surrounded by the plastic, and they are steel slugs, unlike the Fender pickups which feature exposed slugs that are magnets. The magnet on this pickup is a ceramic bar-looking rig that is securely glued to the bottom of the pickup. From this position it "magnetizes" the steel poles.
A key piece of this operation is the double-sided tape. This is 3m tape from Grainger, but you can get comparable tapes from local home stores. Make sure that you center the tape on the sewing machine's rotating wheel. This will ensure the bobbin rotates "squarely" and you get a nice coil.
The flash was too much! Here is a dark photo of the bobbin on the machine with a good amount of wire already wound....and a wire break! I'm not too sure about the Stew-Mac wire. While it is convenient to buy a small spool of wire, it seemed very delicate and "tangly" compared to other wires we consistently use from MWS Wire Industries. It is also a little pricey. This break occurred due to a tangle on the wire spool. It looks like whoever did the winding was not very skilled. Talk about aggravation! We had to strip this pickup twice! Our pickup guru (?) guided the wire with his right hand, and worked the sewing machine's controller pedal with his left hand. The machine is turned this way to get the proper winding direction, i.e. away from the pickup dude.
Using the tried and true method of "wind it until it looks right", we wound up with this nice looking pickup. The wind was tight and very even. We decided we may hook some poor eBay sap up with this rig -- "hand made...scatter wound...vintage sounding." In reality, everything checked out and we're planning to install it in one of our guitars soon.
Here is the rewound humbucker. Its specs wound up very close to an old PAF, and it sounds great. We retaped the pickup with Stew-Mac tape, and it looks great. We didn't have a guerilla wax potting rig, so that will have to wait until we get home. We used two popsicle sticks to raise the bobbins above the rim of the wheel on the machine. Low tech, low cost, works great.
Bottom Line: Give it a try. We are sure you have a sewing machine in your house that hasn't been used in years. WARNING: WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES IF YOU TRY THIS. IF THE TAPE LETS GO, YOU MAY GET A BOBBIN IN THE FACE. ALSO, OPERATE THE SEWING MACHINE AT A VERY SLOW SPEED TO HELP WITH GUIDING THE WIRE AND TO HELP KEEP THE BOBBIN ON THE MACHINE!

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