DIY Single Coil Guitar Pickup

Here is my rendition of Leperello Mikesiah's "Make a Guitar Pickup:" https://www.instructables.com/Make-A-Guitar-Pickup/

His DIY was a great resource and made me able to make my own, but I tweaked a few things that I think others would appreciate when trying to do this project.

I was lucky enough to have access to a laser cutter for the acrylic plates, but as far as I know any dielectric (insulating material) will do like plastic or wood. You will need the plastic, 6 screws and nuts, thin insulated wire (I used 35 gauge with a flexible coating), some small strong magnets, and then superglue and activating spray.

The first step is to cut out your plate materials. One should have some room for holes or slits to anker your output wires, then drill 6 even holes and thread your screws through and fasten on the outside.

I made my through holes have a loose fit on the screws so they would slide through, but you can probably get away with making them just smaller than the threads and have the screws bite in with no need for nuts or superglue.

For reference, I glued the hell out of the bolts through plastic to get it all to hold well.

Speaking from experience, make sure that the "end" side of your wire is not trapped in the coil while you are winding it. I finished winding the pickup and had to re-do 15-20 minutes of work because I couldn't fish out the end of the cable from the coil.

That being said it's pretty simple if you have nice malleable wire. Make sure that there is more than you need outside of the "spool" and then wrap your wire around the bolts in the middle as evenly as you can and wrap until you run out of room and it kina just looks like a guitar pickup.

When I was happy with the lengths I glued down the wire where it stopped and then cut it loose with a few extra inches for wiring after.

To insulate the pickup, it is important to pot it. In the DIY I followed, candle wax was used, but I thought I could get away with filling it with superglue I had.

My superglue had a pipette end so I was able to fill the pickup from the inside out and then cover the entire thing in glue. I would highly recommend using accelerant here to harden this amount of superglue so it doesn't have a chance to spill out all over you.

I found an 1/8 inch aux cable like you can find on most headphones to use for the wiring since I had 1/8 to 1/4 adapters I could use for the guitar amp. Since my chord was a 2 ring 3 wire configuration, I checked with a multimeter to see which one was ground and then soldered the other two together since pickups only have one output to a guitar amp instead of left and right like headphones.

Next I soldered the ground to the wire at the start of the winding, and the other two that I fused to the end wire and taped it up to shield it.

As a note, this can be done without soldering equipment by using cable nuts or just twisting the wires together and taping them, however, bad connections makes for really really loud sounds coming out of your guitar amp so be warned.

Glue Dat Shit Down

I was able to find magnets that were the perfect size but I think any strong magnet(s) will do as long as you set them up with the poles in the same direction (you can check this with another magnet.) I glued mine down too just as a precaution.

Rock on.

Next steps include bolting this to a shovel.

My pickup is upside-down here because it looked better like that for pictures.