DIY Pallet Wood & Rusty Nail Humbuckers - PAFS (Pallet AF)
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- I have a lot to learn and can't wait to keep going. Here's my first attempt at a unique pickup using a LOT of reclaimed materials. Any one crazy enough to try them? newperspective...
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be good,
Tim
I bought these pickups for a Michael Kelly Hybrid to replace the stock pickups. I love them. Sound exactly as advertised; the inconsistency is consistent. :) But more than that, they are great art. Everytime I look at the guitar with these pickups in it, I smile. My one of a kind.
lol. "The inconsistency is consistent." A perfect review! Glad you dig 'em. I'd love to see a pic
To be clear, I am here 100% for the nonsense. 😁 Thinking outside the box and creating interesting art. If that's nonsense, I'd like some more please. These pickups look pretty sweet and first attempts are sounding decent. I'm sure further experimentation will only achieve better and more interesting results. Thanks for sharing!
Nonsense is the fun part!
How much more nonsense would make sense?
UPDATE: In the bass demo, I had a brain cramp and miswired the pickups so they are out of phase. I have rewired them and they sound AMAZING! Be sure to tune in to future videos to hear them properly and/or follow me on instagram @TimSway1 to hear the bass now.
i need to know what you used to remove those nails
@@thatfatguy4508 it's called an "air denailer"
@@timsway thanks a bunch i have never seen someone get nails out of a pallet so easily before
I just came to the comment section to say I think you got them out of phase. Glad you could hear it yourself!
it sounds amazing anyway !!!
from where did you get the magnets ?
incredible work
i want to share with you my EP, it was made in linux (100% open source !!)
ruclips.net/p/PLYm8kX40uBjn8bdQ1LwciZAqHL29hCAeo
thank for showing your workflow
Do yourself a huge favour and get a cheap multimeter that can measure inductance, LCR types that just do inductance, capacitance and resistance are very cheap now. Inductance is the key property of guitar pickups and the main factor in frequency response, it will tell you what your core material is contributing to the output and frequency response (pickups are an LCR filter, use the volume pot and amplifier input resistance for R and the cable capacitance (about 500pf) for C, if you run the numbers, the capacitance of pickup and the amount you can influence is a few feet of guitar cable) so you won't be shooting in the dark. DC resistance is something of a proxy for this from the days you needed expensive lab equipment and some knowledge to measure inductance.
Pick nails that stick to a magnet really well, some hardened steels don't at all and for this use is problematic. It may be that your inadvertent heat treatment with the belt sander alters this.
Note that a classic humbucker uses steel slugs with a magnet in the rear not alnico rods, and you need about 8500 turns around around alnico rods to get the same inductance and cut-off frequency as 6500 turns around steel slugs IIRC. But two coils voiced like strat singles make a really gutsy distortion humbucker. You get different behaviour in the upper mids as you change the about of inductive core material and winds to get the same inductance, alnico or less steel can give you a resonant stratty spike, increasing the amount of steel drops this spike and my give a slight bid scoop before dropping into a very smooth rolloff like the tone was rolled off if you have a lot of steel.
thanks for all the info! That's why I make and share these videos. It's a two-way street of knowledge :)
PAFs don’t have magnetized pole pieces, just the bar magnet below. So you’re kind of mixing a Fender single coil style and a humbucker together.
Please don't strive too hard for perfection Tim. Those pickups already exist out there in abundance.
Think boutique, and create the 'Tim Sway' sound.
When they don't quite sound like the PAF you were aiming for, you're probably onto a winner!
Just remember, there's many-a-guitarist that love the unique sound of Lipsticks and Gold foils.
Oh believe me, "Perfection" is never in my sites. HAHAHA!
Some thoughts. You might look into cigar boxes for your plywood. I build cigar box guitars and the box lids on some are surprisingly strong. Old IDE and SCSI hard drives have insanely powerful magnets. Even laptop hard drives have strong magnets. (don't forget old speaker magnets for your magnetizing needs) Also you might hunt around for an electric demagnatizer. (which is actually an electromagnet on a handle) They were used in the recording and data industries to over write the magnatism on old reel to reel or data backup cassette tapes. Might be faster and more even than your vise magnatizer setup.
Hope some of that is helpful. Peace.
Having nonsense makes it funnier to watch. That's just my opinion though. Keep up your work you're doing fine.
You don’t need alnico poles. Just steel slugs. Use a nickel base plate and be sure the bar magnet makes good contact with the slugs and nails. That will help immensely
Yup.
any old "soft" steel... or yeah, nickel... forget thats a ferromagnet...
florists wire is good.
mu-metal or silicon steel from transformer cores... ;)
ferrite slugs...
LOTS of options...
An idea for the nails, maybe get a small steel flat bar, drill holes to receive the nails, and then tack weld the nails to the bar. That way you don't have to worry about the uneven surface of the nails making poor contact with the magnet, and the magnetic flux can flow better through the nails.
What nonsense I think what you do is fantastic and must inspire a lot of people
I'm my experiments, there have been few, I was using heat shrink tubes to cover the pole pieces under the bobbin. Might help stabilize your nail side
that's a great idea!
Pickups are a simple concept but are no joke when it comes to making them.
I would either use bar magnets or rod magnets, not both.
There’s new pickups out there with a mix of wire gauge on separate coils. I can’t remember what brand/model though.
The first Broadcaster pickups used 43 on the bridge and 42 on the neck.
Good luck with the design!
indeed! very small variables make very big changes. Looking forward to learning more. It's a lot of fun
DiMarzio does a combo of 42 and 43 or other gauge wires on opposite bobbins the same humbucker for a bunch of their designs. The idea is each bobbin ends up with a different frequency range, but ideally the same noise and hum for cancellation purposes. An extreme combo (really thin on one side, thick on the other) would even give it a scooped midrange tone (see dimarzio Steve's special)
I learned a LOT watching this video, and that means something coming from the only other person to film themselves making a guitar pickup out of actual garbage!
you're an inspiration
I am a maker/tinkerer, so the tech side of this appealed to me as well as the goal of using recycled material. And I don't think there's a maker out there who doesn't have a soft spot for re-using pallets.
Additionally, I have a long-time friend who is a musician and sometime last year we had a LONG conversation where he basically taught me about how pickups work and, amazingly, a lot of it stuck with me and I was able to follow what you were doing.
I've sent the video to him for his interest as well. Thank you!
awesome. I'm still learning (there's a lot to learn!)
If you're saving the nails that means you're patient enough to take the nails out of a pallet.
Respect
If you build with junk you get more junk.
The nail side will always be lower with how you have done it because the magnetic field from the actual... magnets in the other side carry a stronger field through them, which magnetizes the strings better.
What you've got is closer to what PRS did to make their coil splits sound better (Or so I've heard - I don't often get to mess with those guitars) - The side that split out for the single coil used alnico slugs, where the screw (in your case, nail) side just had a bar magnetizing it. PAFs just use plain metal slugs with that bottom magnet for both coils.
If you're going to stick with the style you have now, my suggestion is to get a second, thin bar magnet to go on the far side of the nail poles - a construction closer to a P-90.
Also, a word of advice on Humbuckers - Mismatch the coils by a few turns, they tend to sound better, something to do with the phase cancelling. Try putting a few extra on the Nail side and a few less on the magnet side to help with the balance.
great info and you helped me feel better about some of my next thoughts/steps. This is 100% why I take the time to make these videos, to get this open flow of knowledge and creativity happening!
This answered alot of my questions too. I didn't know that the alnico slugs side was meant to be both magnetised and then connected to the bar magnet. Good info
@@timsway Have you tried adding passive magnetization to the nails via rubbing them with a permanent magnet? I'm wondering if that would be worth it, especially since the nails are so old and beat up, they might not let the field pass through them very well compared to new nails. (just a guess, as I'm no magnet expert)
This video by the Action Lab on magnetization might prove useful though: ruclips.net/video/oNjMLtHFxkU/видео.html
Good advice!!
@@fphantom Those poor old nails... I always say "Excuse me for hitting you!" and then I hammer them on their heads. That really helps, they don't scream like they used to do. Any idea when iron was formed, after the big bang? Those nails are older than you'd think.
In pickups there is a world! Hunbuckers specially...connecting series/parallel....phase out of phase...extreme variaty of sound!
As these pickups are all about recycling. What about the possibility of actually using the wire from an electric motor. They after all are still thin insulated copper wire and you should be able to find all different gauges to experiment with, also they might have other useful bits you could incorporate into the pickups. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
that is a future goal.
From my understanding… Rust inside a pickup winding leads to pickup failure. The nails are a super neat idea but probably not a great one. P.S. I am no expert. Just something I think I heard in a stewmac tele pickup rewind video… cool stuff Tim
As always- really impressed.. the bass pickups in single coil sound great .. but you’ll get there with the humbuckers
my first, and only pickup (for a sympathetic string box aka "electric sitar") was using a bit of hacksaw blade with teeth ground off. bit of teflon tape and notch in each end.
surprised many that it worked, being high carbon steel...
i ever do it again, its getting the "I" from the core of a transformer...
i prefer blade pickups for some reason... still have my schaller twin blade "single coil" humbucker from 25 odd years ago... its always ended up in my primary guitar of the time.
relay coils work well. can embed them in random places, then get crazy with series/parallel, in-phase/anti-phase configurations...
I like where your madness is going ;-)
Since you're looking for weird designs, in the cigar box guitar world there is a thing called a Flat PUP. It's a humbucking design that is very flat that some people seem to like (I never tried one myself). And since it's from the CBG world, it can easily be made using reclaimed materials.Also, there are electrical magnetizers that exist. I think they are used by the model train enthusiasts to re-magnetize the motors when they're old (I know James May has one).
Flat pups are pretty amazing. They sound great on CBGs. But I also tried one on a Squier Strat that sounded really good too.
Flat PUPs are a derivative of the Sidewinder Humbucker, someone just realized "Wait, we don't need a thick bobbin."
Really neat to see people attach themselves to that pickup design though, it didn't get a lot of love.
@@alaricpaley6865 I never heard of the Sidewinder pickup before. Thanks for the info.
Should’ve used a Euro-pallet. They’re more vintage sounding. Lower output and more clarity.
This is just the natural evolution of yet something else Tim Sway makes……bad ass yo !
I'm going all the way! slowly :)
This is CAF!! Cool as F@$!!! Good in ya man!! Interesting design and creative use of reclaimed materials, really cool!! Great video, one of the better videos on youtube showing how to make pickups and how they work, thanks!!
Hope you are finding HT pallets. Good luck with the tree-hugging thing. Don't mind me I'm going to be over here saving the earth while I fire up my laser cutter.
Humbucker is going to work best when you have a good balance between coils.
Have a suggestion for bass pickups:
Square (concrete) nails turned horizontally for poles.
I like those bass riffs tho. Can you do Wrathchild? (Iron Maiden)
That's some pretty damn cool tinkering. Probably not good that my mind went straight to 'The Three Stooges' as soon as i saw that rubber tipped mallet, hanging on your wall.
It sounded really good so far, guitar and bass. You'r giving Seymour Duncan a run for it's money
Another commenter mentioned you mixing alnico pole pieces with steel, I'm going to add to that in as much as screws were used for pole piece height adjustability. Perhaps try using the nails and screws instead? That way you get 100% of your gauss from the (alnico?) bar magnet! Great vid!
good times and fun stuff! I just put a reclaimed wood pickguard on my strat. After I showed pics and talked about it on Discord, this shows up on my RUclips >_> well, it worked out, I guess, because I liked it lol...
I can see "pallet pickups" on the shelf. Wood guitars with matching pickups. Different woods, pretty.
You can melt down plastic to make a resin you can use for the bobins to prevent warping over time. Endless plastic to use for this. Magnet wise if you want to recycle, you can find cheap pickup lots in ebay, all sorts of old audio equipment, many tools, toys, jewelery, etc too. Older stuff use ceramic and newer uses neodymium usually.
Steel doesn't magnetize as easy as AlNiCo. Try Pre-magnetizing the nails by winding copper wire around the nail and running current through the wire. That is how I magnetize screwdrivers so the hold screws. Works much better on steel like nails....
Fascinating video love the learning as you go along. First time I've seen paraffin wax used like that very clever. As a bass player the bass pickups sounded gnarly. 😊
I had a crazy idea. Most people told me it was impossible, but one person told me it was just dangerous and foolish. But .... in theory you can put DC through the pickup to boost the magnetic field (using them as dynamic electromagnets) and it should be able to coexist with the AC signal without interfering. Possibly, you'd need to bleed or filter off the DC before it hits an amp or pedal.
wow tim this was amaaaaaaazing, you rule so much
Use steel rods with a bar magnet, don't use alnico poles with a humbucker you lose so much output,I've spun hundreds of pickups,. Tried every combo of magnets.
Super cool Tim!! I love the real and rawness of your content!!! It’s awesome!!! You got some great suggestions on here! I know nothing about any of this, I can plug a bass in and play it pretty good that’s about it lol
Pallette As Fudge. Rock on Tim. Now you got my mind a thinking. Thanks for the inspiration. ;)
Great video. Super interesting. Had no idea what's inside a pick up. Mahalo for sharing! 🙂🐒
Hey, good work- those bass pickups sounded great as single coils (I saw your pinned post). Obviously, laptop speakers are pretty limited, but that sounded like a usable J-style tone to me...
Nice. Thanks for sharing the adventures.
I know nothing really about making electromagnets. So this might be rubbish. I see the nails are quite thin compared to the other pickup parts. How about grinding two nails on the side so they can fit snugly together?. Even add a bit of solder to bind them if you think it would help. !
Might be more work than fun though! It might make the sound bigger and more character full too.
Keep having fun and sharing.
Love the acronym, but knowing that one guitar company's tendencies with litigation.... Just watch out.
It would be bogus if they tried something, but that hasn't stopped them in other cases.
Just came across this today, I agree with your thoughts about making some that's sounds different than the usual pickups that you hear. Thinking outside the box, and creating something new is how we create new great tones, Hendrix did things outside of the norm for his time, and people are still trying to copy it to this day.
7:11 I'll be darned! At first eye said; 2 my self, "self, he really did it"! I'd love to get in on the list of first customers, but no income. In 5-10 years they may become?
i made my own pickup when i was 11 years old, even dont know whats that thing for or how it work, because thats homework,something you knew how to make but dont know how the theory work, and made an EI transformer too,i think still got that pickup somewhere in my apartment, and that transformer still in my little hifi amp, shiit!! almost 28 years ago, feels not that long ago......
I think if you made pickup surrounds and maybe covers you could create a sizeable market.
Haha! So utterly cool and such a pup would be an excellent choice on my own built "Wood shack" cigar box guitar!
Great, now i can't get the idea of minihumbuckers in varnished wood out of my head....
This was cool AF. I'm a drummer who knows nothing about guitars , but I thought your video was bad ass.
Awesome man, got me all inspired... I love the creativity.
My first journey to thus channel and damn. I'm loving it. I want some of those for my faux Paul.
I've got an early 80s USA-made J.B. Player with a Mighty Mite Motherbucker--three coils all right next to each other, two bar magnets, each coil running to an on/off/phase reverse switch. I'd be very interested to see a New Perspectives version of it.
Cool. I'm gonna look that one up. Baby steps. I gotta make a working double coil first, lol :)
@@timsway caveat: Mighty Mite today makes a product called the Motherbucker, but it's not the same thing. It's just a regular ol' high-output humbucker. The real McCoys were made when Randy Zacuto was still at the helm. About 4.3K DC resistance per coil, and I believe the magnets were highly charged Alnico 5s.
Ok, now I need a rusty nail humbucker. I have a perfect project(s) for these.
I have absolutely no qualification, but my gut tells me that these would work/sound better if you removed the rust from the nails.
antique nails would work better than new ones do. so keep an eye out. i was thinking about buying a cheap old record player and converting it to pickup winding duty. but funding has become an issue lol. the nails ide want to try are square and taper on 2 sides. i think a strip or two of refrigerator magnet under the nail slugs would solve the output issue? along with a thin bar magnet or a square bar magnet you have options.
Give those pickups several more winds and get up to 21.5 or higher K.
This one was one of the best you've ever done.
thanks
Is that like, really a nice way to treat hums? Like, is that a really nice thing to do to the hums? To be buckin’ ‘em? I mean, what if they’re nice hums?
Loving your work Tim, the whole idea of pickup making seems a lot less scary now 🙂 Thanks
You could use screws instead of nails to give some height adjust ability
Nonsense all the way , I’m subscribed and sending a huge thumbs up.
don't strike the magnets. it whacks out the magnetism, but if you magnetize after - doesn't matter.
Nice tones Tim, good work. But now there will be endless discussions on tone wood in pickups. You evil person!!
Maybe instead of one nail per string, you could double them up like on bass pickups.
2 thoughts 1 optical pickups or 2 wireless pickups. You think?
It would be cool if there was a joystick option for lasers. That was way ya could free hand.
PAF could be Pallet, Aged Ferrous
LOL!
Why not use rusty screws?, then you have adjustable pole pieces.
Part of me would absolutely love to just mess around and find out with the pickups you said would be in your store, but at the same time, I generally prefer my pickups to be a bit more spicy. Like, 10k at the lowest in the bridge, typically aiming more for the mid-teens. So, I'd rather have them go to someone who could get more use out of them.
As Art Carney used to say,or was it Henry Gibson ?????Very interesting.
This is awesome, anyone who watches your videos and doesn't approve has mental issues.
I don't know why wood is so underestimated on electric guitars.
I honestly enjoy the nonsense 😆
lol
Love the sound of the bass in single coil setting. do they have built in fuzzzzzzz?
Tim, I have bought Seymour Duncans, I own multiple sets of EMG single and humbucker pickups, solderless, Active and Not. True Story.. I use Amplitube 5, Guitar Rig 6, Computer DAW's which is basically what every guitarist uses now like Kemper. Even thought they may all sound different on the same amp settings, I can make all of them sound nearly identical. I like EMG Active's because they have a compressor built into the chipboard plus I LOVE solder-less pots and input jacks, lol. Even though I can solder, it's just so clean and the ground isn't necessary like with SH-4 Seymour Duncan. Either way.. Those are amazing pickups, but before you go down the long and winding road of searching for the perfect tone, you should mess around with a Kemper, DAW or modern amps that have so many different settings and sounds cause you will see what I'm talking about.
Although I'm not big into "green" stuff, I like the concept of using free/junk materials to build from. This presents a great opportunity for one to experiment and create without breaking the bank. Les's first guitars were made with an old guitar and junk....... and Bigsby's guitars were made with extra cycle parts. Best wishes at getting your ideal sound.
I was a cheapskate long before I was an environmentalist :)
@@timsway nothing wrong with that. Theres always something special about something you made yourself.
I thought the bass pickups sounded quite good actually
Very cool pickups. One thing i noticed, you said for a humbucker the negative of the first coil goes into the positive of the second. That is not correct, if the coils are wound in the same direction, the finish wires should be connected together and then the start of the first coil is ground and the start of the second coil is the output. The coils has to be electrically out of phase since the magnetic polarity are opposite, then the resulting signal will be in phase when combined, but the hum will be out of phase and cancelled.
thanks for the info. I looked at a bunch of different schematics and have seen lots of confusing and conflicting information. The bass does sound a bit "out of phase:" to me and I plan on experimenting with the wiring some more with the ones I've made as well as do and learn more. Single coils are easy! lol.
This is correct.
Come 0n man ! Buck hums ? U can do a better job at explaining how humbuckers work !! How humbuckers work is - 2 coils sharing the same magnetic (B) field, due to the slightly different locations of the 2 coils relative to the strings, the frequencies generated will be slightly different EXCEPT the noise (or the 'hum'), in mathematical graphs- whenever u have two curves out by a 180 degrees half-cycle, they would cancel each other out, hence it's only the noise caused by the interference of the Earth's gravitational field that is common in both coils , separated by 180 degrees (because being wired out of phase), the hum in the coils being out of phase by 180 degrees would cancel each other out leaving the combined signals of the strings to go to the volume/tone pots...
The same principle applies to when you remove the vocal track from a mix - you wire the two stereo outputs together but out of phase, you would end up with a mono signal of the whole mix minus what's common in both channel, usually the vocals. It's a primitive way of doing it but it works.
you're hired! :)
Ever thought to try the acrilic/metel bass again pack a set of three of these pick ups ?
Refrigerator magnets work very well,,,,😎
I LOVE this stuff. Tim, you may be interested in this wacky guy somewhere down south, who experimented with diy scrap wood pickups in some out-of-the-box ways: ruclips.net/video/tQeI_nALTi4/видео.html
thanks. I'll check it out!
Jesus Christ, dude I check in from time to time but you’re really coming into your own lately. Proud of you.
Very cool project, and I love the sound of the bass pickups, especially in single coil mode (and yes I saw the explanation in your 'pin').👍
you may want to reverse the poles on the betty white flux capacitor for a more vintage tone.
This is pretty awesome and I think that deserves a subscribe!
They are actually very cool looking pickups. I can see people wanting professionally made pickups with that look.
tim sway hey buddy beautiful work. Shared with all my guitar buddies 👍 hey quick question. Where, if you have found. Blades for the delta planer? I have a same one. I Sharpen mine, i got two sets. But they won’t outlast the planer that’s for sure. Thanks bud. Keep up the great content 😎
they sell them right at my local box store but they don't say delta on the pack. They're pretty standard to several models: www.lowes.com/pd/CRAFTSMAN-Planer-Knives/1003014308
Luan is what Epiphone uses for their bodies :p #TheMoreYouKnow
PAF = Pine's All Fine.
Ive seen a vid where around the 2nd war they used ear pieces of broken earphones as pickups
a bass guitar that sounds metal 14:00 did you try some fuzz? Just to compare hums and parasites? Does it compare worse or better? Did you try other experiments to eliminate hums or 60 cycle. Sometimes it is house electrical. But is there a way to eliminate it? Just see Ola Englund with 4 metal pedals to see what I'm talking about. ruclips.net/video/oR5-5aO1PIs/видео.html Metallica did use the demagnetizer for pickups. ruclips.net/video/BimCD1Bhzrw/видео.html
there will be a video about the bass, soon, and I put it through some effects. In this video, I had them out of phase, like an indiot. Wait until you hear them now!
i need these i got ml soundlabs stevie t amp sims on my computer they match the cardboard cover
Trust me when I tell you there's a market for these in the cigar box guitar world! I would love to see you send a set to @Shane Speal and y'all do a collab video/project together! Keep it up!
oh for sure. My whole thing is basically just what the CBG builders are all doing, but pushing it to a full scale guitar.
Subscribed right now for the nonsense! Somehow guitar community is full of purists, and I love to see someone doing things differently.
Welcome! In the "guitar community" they either love me or hate me or, more likely, never heard of me :)
Fender-style single coil pickups use alnico pole pieces, which can be magnetically charged (cheaper versions use a ceramic magnet underneath steel pole pieces). Humbuckers normally only have a bar magnet underneath the pickup, and located between the screws and (non-magnetised) steel slugs in the other coil. Your pickup shouldn't really have alnico slugs as well as a bar magnet: depending on how you have charged the alnico pole pieces, it seems that at least on one pickup shown in this video, the bar magnet polarity is cancelling-out the magnetic polarity of the alnico poles. I like the idea of making your own pickups, though the cost of the winder and the laser cutter will be very hard to recoup, unless you start to sell your pickups!
the laser cutter has paid for itself 10X over. Pound per pound it is the most valuable tool in my shop (and one of the most expensive). HIGHLY recommended if you want to make stuff for a living. Obviously i use it to make other things, too :) The winder is inexpensive. thanks for thew input!