Pickup winding

[angelodp]

I am getting ready to wind some pickups. I have the sewing machine and getting rigged up with a reed switch etc. I tried to score a PCB based cheapo calculator to make the counter and it was a paper trace.... yuck. Any of my brethren happen to know if Staples or Radio shack have $10 or under calcs that are PCB based??

Thanks A

[angelodp]

Used a $1 dollar calculator and taped the reed counter leads to the equals key/ Works great.

[9pins]

the hard part is making a tension-er of some sort, keep the work tidy with out breaking the fine gauge, you can do it by hand, but its nice to to have a rig that'll be more consistant

[katopan]

I used a cheap calculator and reed switch for counting turns for transformer winding. It was the sort with the lump of goo over the chip and carbon track acetate sheet for the button area. Knowing I couldn't solder onto the carbon tracks I soldered my wires onto the PCB right next to the goo. Don't know if it was static or the soldering heat but it worked for a while and then gave up working. Did another one of a different model, but the insides were very similar and it failed too. I ended up counting the rest of the transformer manually and marking on paper so I didn't loose track. Very tedious!

Does your calc have the carbon track overlay sheet as well? Did you just tape to that?

[David Root]

I used mechanical pre-digital counters, still available on fleabay, but tensioners are another matter. The old felt pad under a guitar pot bolted to a piece of wood works, but I ended up with a professional mechanical tensioner, made by a Swiss company called Meteor.

I haven't wound pickups for a while but I still have all the eqpt and bobbins, wire etc. I think I would probably use the thumb and forefinger method now as that gives you complete control over both tension and scatterwinding at all times.