…and it is alive.

I had a ton of trouble getting the pickups to work well!  I really didn’t want to drill holes in the beautiful thuya burl pickup covers, but no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the pickups to sound good without getting the strings closer to the magnetic field.  I finally ended up drilling holes for 12 alnico magnets in each pickup.  I made bobbins from maple and used alnico 2 magnets in the bridge and alnico 5’s at the neck.  The neck pickup has 2x 5000 windings and the bridge has 2x 5500.

Strangely, even though I have 10,000+ winds on each pickup, I’m getting a sound very much like a Strat from these pickups.

2013-11-23 13.09.10
one of four maple bobbins…

I tried many different styles of pickup- blades, stacked-

-many attempts
-many attempts

I also spent a lot of time making knobs for this guitar.  I had a couple of ideas in mind, but once I tried them I was disappointed by the look:

2013-12-07 10.10.52
lots of failed knobs to go with the failed pickups.