I had a feeling the whole scatter wound thing was a load of drivel..
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I had a feeling the whole scatter wound thing was a load of drivel..
From my understanding, the advantage of scatter-winding in pickups is that you don't end up introducing something called Stray-Capacitance between the windings which would have a detrimental affect on tone, a pickup can be thought of as a large number of turns of wire around a metal core, in Electronics this is called an Inductor, I won't go too heavily into the theory of it since there's some complex mathematics involved, anyway, if the pickup was wound so that all the windings were neat and orderly, each winding would have a very small capacitance in parallel with it forming what's called a "Tank Circuit", this would resonate at a very high frequency, frequency resonances would show up as sharp peaks in the response of the pickup and in some cases the pickup would actually feed-back at these frequency resonances, so, to combat this pickup makers started winding their pickups with scatter-windings all jumbled up.
Remember that a pickup doesn't put-out much current when it's outputting a signal, it's more of a voltage signal, in Electronics, a circuit such as the typical pickup circuit in an electric guitar, that puts out a low-current voltage-signal is what's called a High-Impedance circuit, and stray capacitance effects are more pronounced in High Impedance circuits.
Sorry Doc erm no, no one started scatter winding for a reason, other than expense, Gibson were using machines and Fender were using hand winders. In 1956 Fender employed Abigail Ybarra or Abby shes still winding today (suppose to be retired) and what a sweetheart, she is and personally hired by Leo. Her hand winds are worth a fortune. In 65 Fender moved to machine winding, and they dropped their winds from and average of 8000+ to about 7650 they switched from Formvar to Plain Enamel.
Even the most advanced coil winders need modification to wind elongated pickup bobbins. Oblong bobbins pull different lengths of wire during the phases of each rotation. This requires synchronized changes in tension during each rotation to avoid pressure points at the narrow ends of the bobbin. These pressure points can cause shorts in the coil which create eddy currents.
These Eddy currents or shorts are the only thing relevant in a pickup, besides good winding, its why i dip my bobbins in Poly U so the wire can never short on the poles.
Abby is still winding pups?
Gee, dear lady must be pushing 90! What a legend she is :)
Apparently she sneaks into Custom Shop, cant stay away
https://youtu.be/8M2a1yUmvEQ
^ And this is why I love this forum.
Folk sharing their knowledge freely and in the spirit of friendship.
And whilst we are on the subject of hand made gear, here is a vid of the Fender factory...
Back when they built by hand...
http://youtu.be/nswcAPvH0P8
Makes you wonder how these guys spraying nitro etc with no shirt or face mask got on in later life, no one cared back then of the consequences.
I was thinking the same thing..
Different time and place, I guess they still had yet to find out why spray painters were dying younger than the average age..
Just think about it, car manufacturers, furniture makers, electrical goods etc were all spraying with nitro back then.. Scary stuff!