31

The Pickup Place / Re: Wax Potting vs Lacquer Potting....

« on: July 11, 2019, 06:44:29 PM »

Bill Lawrence used epoxy, but I’m unsure if he used wax as well.

I use epoxy on my bass pickups. They still have to be wax potted. The epoxy doesn’t deep in.


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32

The Pickup Place / Re: Wax Potting vs Lacquer Potting....

« on: July 11, 2019, 05:50:01 PM »

Not sure if you saw my wax potting thread on he Duncan forum.
Anyway, I have a pickup that needs to be potted. In my research I’ve learned the main reason that most prefer wax is that once you lacquer a pickup, there is no fixing it if anything should ever go wrong in the future. With wax you can always carefully pick it away if you ever needed to.
I’ll be potting my pickup this weekend. Fingers crossed....I’ll be busting my cherry.  Lol

I’m a pickup maker. Back in 2005 I experimented with using lacquer, varnish, or polyurethane for potting. Even did one with super glue!

The problems I found were that the inside wraps were left unpotted. So you still got squealing, and as you said, you need to cut the coil off as you can’t unwind it. Not that I ever unwind coils.

I went back to wax because other methods didn’t stop the microphonic squealing.

I’ve got a Parker P-38. It has my own pickups in it. They are all potted and outside of the guitar won’t squeal if placed by the speaker. 
But in some situations that guitar cab make a lot of noise near the amp.

It’s a very light weight and acoustically lively guitar. So I also hear my pick tapping the body.

But the high pitched feedback is usually lose parts near the pickup. Sometimes just tightening the screws that hold the bobbins in place helps.

I had a customer with a single coil size humbucker that would squeal near the amp. It was potted but I ended up firmly wrapping black cloth tape around it to stop any vibrations in the structure of the pickup, and that fixed it. The bobbins where able to vibrate a bit. 


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33

The Pickup Place / Re: Super Distortion S DP218 Wiring Diagrams???

« on: July 11, 2019, 04:44:59 PM »

What’s the problem?

Red is hot, green and bare are ground. Black and white connect together.

Then just follow any standard Strat wiring diagram.


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34

The Pickup Place / Re: Wax Potting vs Lacquer Potting....

« on: July 11, 2019, 04:42:47 PM »

It doesn’t get very far into the coil, and sometimes doesn’t dry fully. Fender also used self bonding wire.

They eventually went back to wax potting because it works better.


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35

The Pickup Place / Larry DiMarzio

« on: June 18, 2019, 03:07:31 PM »

I read that Bill Lawrence taught Larry DiMarzio and Kent Armstrong how to make pickups under his tutelage.  It seems that the Super Distortion, Dual Sound, PAF, FS1 were created by Larry. 

That’s correct. But Steve was in the picture when him and Larry started the company in their basement.  Larry’s dad was the one that actually started the company, and used to be at the shop a lot until he passed away. Larry’s daughter is the current CEO.

There is no Larry on the winding machines or a “MJ” magic winder.   Fender and Duncan put a face to a custom winder, which probably adds value.  DiMarzio is faceless and you dont see any factory videos.  Maybe PG should do a factory tour video.

Of course all the pickup designs are by them, so the winding department winds to their specs. Duncan does hand wind some pickups. DiMarzio doesn’t hand wind at all. They have about a dozen or so people running the coil winders.

You will probably never see a video or photos from inside DiMarzio. Cameras and cell phones are forbidden in the winding area. They are very secretive. I had to sign a NDA.

The place is smaller than you’d expect, but runs very efficiently. I personally would work on a couple of hundred pickups a day.

The thing that impressed me was how many different custom parts they use. Lots of different pole screws, magnets, and things you don’t see.  They also make all the straps and cables in house. Had little old ladies sewing straps. lol.



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36

The Pickup Place / Re: Identify this Pickup! Help!

« on: June 13, 2019, 10:57:46 AM »

It’s probably an old DiMarzio PAF.

The current 36th Anniversary model is 7.31k.

They are nice sounding pickups.


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37

The Pickup Place / Re: Larry DiMarzio

« on: June 13, 2019, 10:50:09 AM »

Yeah Steve is the main guy. They have an actual lab there.

And at Duncan the main guy is Keven Beller. You see his name on most of the parents.


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38

The Pickup Place / Re: Capacitors affect your pickup tone even on 10.

« on: June 02, 2019, 08:11:50 PM »

They don’t really. Capacitors have an impedance. That changes with frequency. This is why different values pass different frequencies.

At the frequency at which the RC circuit is resonant, the cap’s impedance is a lot less than the pot value.  So the cap looks like a wire.

As you turn down the tone control pot from ten, the major effect is changing the resistive loading on the resonant circuit. This is because the impedance of the capacitor in the range of the resonance is a lot less than the pot value.

As the pot gets closer to zero, the capacitor becomes important, but the initial effect is just resistive loading.

So if you remove the cap you might hear a difference on 10, but you won’t hear a difference with different value caps.

In one of my basses I have a switch to chose between two different value caps or no cap. When the tone control is on 10, switching the switch does nothing to the sound.  That’s with a 500k pot.

With 250k you might hear more resistance loading. If you want to remove the cap on 10, get a no load pot.

The function of the cap is to pass signal above its resonant frequency to ground. That’s your high frequency content. So your signal gets muffled. And all this talk about paper-in-oil sounding “better” than a film cap, or even ceramic is nonsense, since you never hear the signal passing through the cap.

All that matters is the value of the cap, and it shouldn’t be old and “leaky” or have a too high an ESR rating. That’s the resistance of the cap. But that’s usually pretty low. Ceramic caps have a lower ESR than film caps. But at the most it’s a couple of ohms.


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39

The Pickup Place / Re: Pickup pole adjustment tool size

« on: May 29, 2019, 07:09:13 PM »

There’s no real reason to adjust the poles. It doesn’t change the magnetic field that much.


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40

The Pickup Place / Re: DiMarzio Custom Shop

« on: May 29, 2019, 06:52:44 PM »

Wow.... I was expecting a bit more.  I figured that they were larger than that.  With all the pickups and accessories that they sell, I expected a bit more.  That shop makes big corporate dollars worldwide.  I guess Larry keeps it simple for a reason.  Do what you do best and don’t venture far from the business plan.  It’s worked for 40 years, and technology is basically the same as the 1950’s.  Bill Lawrence taught him well.

I was impressed that they do everything in house. There’s elderly women sewing straps, and they make the cables and stuff right there.

It’s a well run operation.

Another thing I didn’t realize is they make lots of OEM pickups for Ibanez and Ernie Ball. So even when they don’t say “DiMarzio” pickups, they are.


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41

The Pickup Place / Re: DiMarzio Custom Shop

« on: May 29, 2019, 03:25:08 PM »

DiMarzio’s a small company?  They probable sell thousands of pickups every week, not to mention the OEM deals.

I worked there for a bit. Not a big company by any means. Maybe 50 people work there? But they do make hundreds of pickups a day.

I was assembling pickups and would see custom orders from time to time. Might have just been the color and stuff.

They certainly do make custom pickups for people, but that wasn’t in my area so I guess just email or call them.




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42

The Pickup Place / Re: Wiring a dimarzio super dist hotrails into a mex fender Tele

« on: May 20, 2019, 02:06:59 AM »

DiMarzio doesn’t make Hotrails. Duncan does.

Just follow the directions that came with the pickup. If it is a DiMarzio, red is hot, green is ground, and black and white connect together.


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43

The Pickup Place / Re: Machine vs Scattered wound vs Hand Wound

« on: May 16, 2019, 05:38:03 PM »

It is arguable that a length a insulated wire whether next to each other or scattered along adjacent winds is till touching multiple windings.  Electrical current is going to pass regardless if on a neat coil or a scattered coil.  It is plausible that a neat coil will fit more wire on the coil rather than a randomized overlapping scattered coil.  I’m not sure if 8000 winds by either by hand or machine will have a dramatic difference in tonal quality of the pickup.  Perhaps it’s just marketing mojo to replicate past manufacturing processes without automated systems.

Yes, neat coils are more compact.

Don’t forget that the wire isn’t just passing current; the pickup is generating current. Current flowing through a wire produces a magnetic field around it. That field can induce current in neighboring turns. This is called mutual inductance. 

Also larger coils make the outer turns farther from the poles. This is one reason a Jazzmaster pickup sounds different from a Strat (wide/shallow vs. narrow/tall).

Pickups are complex devices when it comes to trying to model all the parameters. Sometimes claims are made as to why you get a certain tone. These claims are often scientifically wrong, but we can take from this that the reasons why stated might not be correct, but the change of tone is real.

Same with guitar markers talking about coupling vibrations between parts. That’s not a real thing that you get any benefits from.

I find that neatly wound coils have a tighter low and and a crisper top end than very scattered coils. Similar effects are heard with thinner gauge wire, like 43 or 44 AWG.

Another example of placing turns farther apart is magnet wire with heavy build insulation, like heavy formvar. It has a “rounder” tone than single build. Heavier magnet wire, like 41 AWG has a similar tone.




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44

The Pickup Place / Re: Set Screws For Older SDS-1 pup?

« on: May 15, 2019, 06:39:21 PM »

You aren’t going to find those anywhere. You can’t even find the chrome plated kind.

Contact DiMarzio. They will sell you some.


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45

The Pickup Place / Re: Machine vs Scattered wound vs Hand Wound

« on: May 13, 2019, 02:27:13 PM »

Capacitance happens between any two conductors.  Scatterwound = more wire length/wire = more capacitance. 

The whole scatterwound thing has more to do with eddy currents

No. Scatter winding places more distance between conductors. That reduces capacitance.

Eddy currents are formed on conductive surface in the vicinity of a magnetic field. They produce their own magnetic field that opposes the permanent magnet’s field. This causes high frequency loss.

The magnet wire has too small a surface area to form eddy currents, plus it’s producing its own current.

You can hear the effects of eddy currents when you put a metal cover on a pickup. It flattens and lowers the resonant peak.


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