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Wiring individual pole magnetic pickup.

I have been playing around with making my own pickups and have some questions that I hope someone can answer. I have made some individually wound pickups for individual strings that seem to work pretty good but I have questions on how to wire them together for multiple strings (individual pickup for each string). The way I see it, there are 3 things that can be done. 1. The coils can be wired in parallel or series. 2. The coils can be wound in the same direction or alternated. And 3. The magnet poles can all go in the same direction or can be alternated N/S every other pickup. With these choices, there are 8 different ways to build this (2 to the 3^rd power). Can anyone tell me the best way (or results of the different ways) of wiring these? Will certain combinations cancel out the magnetic field and cause problems?

BTW, Attached is a picture of the coils that I am using. These coils are found in a brake system ABS module and work great and if you can get your hands on some scrapped ABS modules, the coils just pop out (you have to remove the metal shielding). Just add a magnet and wire it up.

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Permalink Reply by Dale "Guv'nor" Crombez on June 4, 2015 at 2:21pm

Skeesix, thanks for the reply. That (temporary alligator clips) was what I was planning on doing. Just need to find the time. Hopefully this weekend.

I just hope these coils work good since it will make making mag pickups easy.

I will definitely check out this book.

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Permalink Reply by Taffy Evans on July 1, 2018 at 1:38am

Stacked humbuckers are available, they are two single coils and can fit into a normal single coil cavity.

Taff

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Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on July 1, 2018 at 9:23am

When using multiple pickups, it's best to alter the wind direction and magnet polarity to keep phase issues at bay. Unless you like the thinner sound associated with the phase condition.

The coils your using may have a low output depending on wire gauge and amount of wire in each coil. Do you have a DCR value for each coil your using?

Low output coils would be better in series. Example being a lipstick tube pickup at 4k DCR compared to a Strat pickup at 5k to 6k DCR. The lipstick tube has a good tone, but often has to be played at loud volumes with big amps to get that goodness from them. Wiring the individual coils in series doubles their output. So 2 lipsticks would then be 8k DCR which is equivalent to a Gibson PAF Humbucker in output and 2 Strat at 10k to 12k DCR for a slight overwound humbucker.

So if each coil reads 1k DCR and you had 6 of them. They would read 6k DCR in series, but only 1k DCR in parallel. Another way would be 2 groups of 3. Each group wired in series and the 2 groups then wired in parallel for 3k DCR.

Hope that helps and doesn't further confuse. More than one way to skin a cat, but it won't taste like chicken. Sorry Nancy. Haha