MAGnets AnD MirACles
while the dust was still settling from our winding experience, I took a short break to talk to Tim mills about the history of making humbuckers and how it relates to the freshly wound small oblong silver item on the workbench in front of us
o kay, so if we go back to the start of making humbuckers, they were wound on a variety of different machines. Gibson were already winding P-90s [in the early 1950s], so logic would have it that they would have probably utilised some of those machines, which were hand-winding machines, at least to do their prototype models of the humbucker, before the fabled Leesona 102 machine was used. That was a coil-winding machine that could wind multiple coils; I believe it was three at a time.” The Leesona was a change of gear for Gibson, wasn’t it? “That machine wasn’t a hand-winding machine, so that would’ve had a pre-tensioner and adjustable traverse. Basically, once you’ve loaded the coil on and attached the wire, you set it off and away it would go. But it didn’t have an accurate counter or shut-off so the operative would be involved in stopping the machine when the coils looked full. So there was no real way of knowing how many turns were going to be on each coil. They’d been shooting for about 5,000, but it could go anywhere up to upper-5,000s or be sub-5,000. That’s where you get the mismatched coils in the early Patent Applied For [units] because, once the coils were finished, they’re all going in a box. Whoever was assembling the pickups would’ve been grabbing a slug coil and a screw coil and putting them together and making a pickup from it – it didn’t necessarily mean that it was exactly the same number of turns on both coils.” And the wire we used today was the same type that Gibson used? “Historically, Gibson always used a 42-gauge plain enamel wire, certainly up until the very early 60s, at which point they changed to a solderable poly/nylon. The SPN wires are easier to work with, because you can just solder direct to them. With the plain enamels, which we used today with your pickup, you have to sand the wire back and strip it before you can solder a conductor to it, so it’s just more labour-intensive.” What about the choice of magnet? “We used a rough-cast Alnico V, what’s referred to as a ‘short Alnico V’, rather than a vintage-cut Alnico V, which is slightly longer. With the fact that the magnet is a little bit shorter, it makes it a little bit more powerful. So, again, that would have been typical of what you would have found in a PAF from late 1960 and then through the various types of Patent Number and T-Top-type humbuckers that came after that. I believe on Seth Lover’s original he always specified Alnico V. But, certainly through the first few years of the Patent Applied For, I don’t think I’ve ever found an Alnico V. Lots of IIs, some IIIs, and Alnico IVs, going through ’55 to ’59. I haven’t personally found a V any earlier than 1960.” How much of an influence does the type of magnet have on the pickup’s sound? “Whereas a magnet obviously doesn’t have a sound, it’s part of a circuit that reproduces a sound. Changing the Alnico and the amount of output that it will produce out of that circuit really does change the sound quite a lot. With an Alnico V, the most strident of those tends to power the high-end quite nicely, so you get a firmer bass response, quite punchy midrange, and a nice cut in the highs. It’s very much the voice of rock, I think, the Alnico V. It’s got everything. It’s got some spit, it’s got some grind, but is a musical tone as well, you know?”