the Build: Bare Knuckle t-top Humbucker
Continuing this issue’s customisation theme, deputy editor David Mead heads off to Bare Knuckle Pickups in Cornwall to try his hand at the deceptively difficult art of winding pickups, embarking on his very own PAF to enlightenment…
w e’ll begin with a confession: once upon a time, I was a serial pickup-changer. Every time I bought a new guitar, the stock pickups would be out of it before you could say “knife”. The guitars from that era that are still with me – which is most of them – have a range of Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro II single coils, Custom Custom humbuckers, David White Old Glories and, more recently, a Bare Knuckle here and there. When I switched to playing acoustic guitar almost exclusively back in 2005 or thereabouts, the madness ceased. I mean, they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, “No, no, no…”
All this being said, one of the projects that I have been meaning to get around to for years is what amounts to performing a factory reset on my 2001 Les Paul Standard. I realise it’s a fool’s errand to try and transform a contemporary guitar into a true vintage piece, but I’ve always reasoned that this isn’t the point. My most admired guitar sound is to be found on Sleepy Time Time from Live Cream, performed on Clapton’s ‘Fool’ 1964 SG Standard, which would have been around four years old at the time. Not ‘vintage’ at all, then: a mere four year old. So the mission is to try and return my Les Paul to ‘fresh out of the box’ status… but from an early 1960s box, if you catch my drift.
When the opportunity came up to kickstart ‘Project Retro’ by winding my own pickup at Bare Knuckle HQ in Falmouth, I jumped at the chance. After all, I’d watched the process before, both on video and in the flesh, and so I reasoned, ‘How hard can it be?’ I was in for a shock. It’s hard.
a proper wind-up
After arriving at Bare Knuckle’s workshop, the first shot across my over-confident bows was being told, “Nobody winds a perfect coil first time. It will probably take you four attempts at least before you get a usable one.” Suitably unnerved, I met with managing director and main man Tim Mills who said he would show me what was involved in winding a pickup and then set me loose to follow his lead.
“We’re just wrapping wire around a coilformer or a bobbin,” he told me. “But we’ve got a couple of variables in there, tension being the main one, and how we actually lay the coil in the coil-former.”
If I didn’t manage to get the tension in the wire right, which was being fed from a spool on the floor between my feet, things were set to go horribly wrong.
“We’re controlling speed, rotation and the tension of the wire and its positioning onto that coil,” Tim continued. “So, if we hold the wire too tight, we run the danger of snapping, or we could stretch
it. If we’re stretching the wire as it goes on, effectively, more wire than we might want is actually going onto the coil, the DC resistance will go up, the voice in the pickup will change, and it probably won’t sound very nice.”
No pressure, then. Tim told me that what we were looking for was a uniform shape with no lumps and bumps owing to my inexperienced hand. I asked Tim if it was possible to wind a humbucker of the PAF family in the time available and he said that we could aim at what Gibson termed as a ‘T-Top’, a pickup that fits into the Gibson humbucker chronology as being more a child of the 60s, having got its name from the fact that, latterly, a ‘T’ was stamped on the top of the bobbin to alert the winding operative to the fact that this was to be the top of the coil.
We also wouldn’t be able to wax-pot the finished result as that particular process takes around two hours and we simply didn’t have the time. This was not a problem because the original PAF-style pickups weren’t always wax potted and so, once we’d sorted out a winding station for me, the fun began.
The first thing I noticed was that the 42 AWG plain enamel wire (AWG standing for American Wire Gauge) that I was responsible for loading onto a bobbin is practically invisible to the untrained eye. It’s roughly the same bore as human hair but more brittle. When I began winding I could feel the tension of the wire in my fingers – Tim recommended I used a piece of felt between fingers and thumb to avoid damaging the insulation – but I could hardly see it at all. I had the ability to vary the speed of the wind and engaged a very low gear for my first attempt, speeding up a little as I became used to the process in hand. We were aiming for exactly 5,000 turns on the electronic counter and we stopped every 300 to 500 just to check how my newbie wind quality was, quite literally, shaping up. Tim gave me instructions like, “More wire to the left and centre…” as the wind proceeded as I was essentially ‘scatterwinding’, that is moving my thumbs left to right so that the wire wrapped onto the bobbin as evenly as possible, albeit in a sort of haphazard fashion.
Alas, my first attempt was too loose, as predicted. Taking it off the winding machine, the wrap felt ‘soggy’ to the touch and so I had another go and this time Tim said we had a perfectly usable
“the first thing i noticed was that the 42 AWG plain enamel wire is practically invisible to the untrained eye”
coil. Confidence restored, then… but I still managed to bugger up the next three. However, the fourth was good enough to go. Along the way there had been moments where Tim’s über-experienced hand had to lean in and take over some of the more complex manoeuvres, such as tying off the two ends of the wire – the beginning, which was secured to the winding machine by a piece of tape, and the end that we snapped off from the reel having reached our 5,000th turn – in order to make sure it didn’t subsequently unravel. As I have said, the wire is very difficult to see and so, for me, securing it in this way was pretty much a bridge too far. coiled & ready What we had now was two coils and Tim assured me that the difficult part was over. The next job was to begin putting the pickup together. Moving to another workbench we assembled a nickel silver baseplate, fly wires, an Alnico V rough cast bar magnet, a maple spacer, brass baseplate screws, Fillister No 5 pole screws and pole slugs. Tim showed me how to strip a section from the braided hookup cable and also how to use a piece of sandpaper to remove the enamel from the ends of the 42 AWG wire on the bobbins to prepare them for soldering. I’d be the first to admit that my soldering skills leave a lot to be desired, but I managed to solder the fly wires onto the ends of the bobbins without major mishap – albeit with shaky hands – and then cover the wire, complete with solder joints, with black paper tape to make sure everything stayed together neatly.
In the meantime, we had measured the DC resistance in each coil, prior to them being linked in series to become a single humbucker. Both coils measured in at around 3.89k, which Tim told me was what he expected it to be for this style of pickup. Furthermore, it reassured me that we actually had two working coils.
Now it was time to insert the metal slugs into one of the coils. This was probably the easiest task of the day as it involved using finger pressure to begin with, then making sure I had a plush fit, pushing the slug home by pressing it against the workbench. Even here, whereas the finished result was satisfactory to my greenhorn eye, Tim still managed to render the slugs even flatter in the bobbin than I could. The screw coils weren’t so easy: this part of the procedure involved using an electronic screwdriver to secure them into the baseplate with the Alnico V bar magnet already in position. An experienced hand would do this in seconds, but Tim warned me a novice tends to go in too fast or slip and scratch the top of the bobbin. Seeing that I was struggling, we decided it’d be better if I switched to manual and use a screwdriver. Slower but necessarily more foolproof.
Once I had secured the slug coil to the baseplate, complete with the period
correct maple spacer underneath, the pickup really began to take on a more familiar form. We took a brief pause before the next stage, to discuss the role the Alnico V magnet was playing in the assembly. Lying as it does between the two coils, one side is north and the other south, so the coils are effectively being magnetised by polar opposites. Once the two coils are connected together in series – another shaky-handed soldering job for me – it means that the hum-cancelling characteristic, Seth Lover’s invaluable gift to the Gibson guitar-playing fraternity, is in operation. And when the hookup cable had been connected, we were in business, but the show wasn’t over quite yet.
Tim’s expertise came to the fore again for the next part of the process, which involved the final neatening up of the unit by tucking away wires inside the paper tape so that nothing would snag on the cover when we put it on. Then another pause to measure the DC resistance, now that everything was connected. It came out at 7.68k: low-output when compared with the pickups already installed on my Les Paul – which I believe to be on the high side – but on the money for a descendent of the PAF humbucker lineage.
All that remained to be done was for the nickel silver cover to be put in place and, as we weren’t wax-potting the pickup, Tim added a few strips of paper tape in strategic places under the cover to keep any errant vibration in check. A couple of “it sounded spot on: rich and sparkling but with that airy quality you find in lower-output scatter-wound pickups” solder joints later – which Tim’s steady hand completed, having warned me that accidentally dripping solder down the inside of the pickup would mean going right back to the beginning of the process – and we were done. Voilà, one complete humbucker, ready to be installed in the bridge position of my Les Paul.
All in all, the process had taken four hours to complete, whereas a more experienced pair of hands could apparently assemble four pickups per hour from wound coils. As the working day was nearly done, we only had the briefest time to plug my guitar into Bare Knuckle’s Marshall JCM800 test amp to appreciate its dulcet tones before it was time to head off into the Cornish sunset. After all, I was eager to get home to test my handiwork through my own gear.
walking on air
When I returned home, I was able to test the new pickup through my own setup
and found that it sounded spot on: rich and sparkling but with that airy quality you find in lower-output scatter-wound pickups. As I suspected, there was an imbalance between the more powerful neck pickup – which I suspect is a Gibson 490R – and the new own-rolled ‘T Top’. Subsequently, and on Tim Mills’ advice, I have readied a neck-position Bare Knuckle Stormy Monday for installation, which has a typical DC reading of 7.1k, so that balance will once again be restored. I’ve also taken steps to upgrade the pots to 500k and the capacitors to Tim’s own custom-built paper-and-oil variety in my own humble quest to turn back time to a more toneful epoch. Guitarist would like to thank Tim Mills at Bare Knuckle Pickups for his time – and especially his patience – for guiding us through the process. For more info on the full Bare Knuckle range, check out www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk