DIY- The making of a relay coil neck pickup

A quick making of: The Neck Pickup,

After building a new neck and glueing the fretboard I had to cut of some inches and thought about using the scrap piece as a neck pickup housing for my current three string project.

Unfortunately the space is really limited for placing a hand wound single coil in it ( ...and for me pickup winding is an annoying, less relaxing job) so I decided to order some miniature relays (10 for about 10$) with a coil resistance of 2.3 kohms each.The first five coils died during the coil remove surgery at various steps (open the housing, removing the coil with its mounting bracket, removing the mounting bracket...throwing the coil on the floor after sucessfully perform the previous steps ;-) since the wire is ULTRA thin......a 0.063mm standard pickup wire is a massive rod compared to the wire they use for those relay coils.

But after some practice I easily removed three coils in a row without killing one

To avoid microphony, I used a carnauba wax solution normally used to seal hardwood floors or furniture (such as guitars :-). Its important to check if there is any agressive thinner in the wax solution which possible can attack the isolation coat of the copper wire.

To get the wax deep into the coil I used a syringe with a three way valve (a simple plug would do it also) throw the coil into the syringe, Fill the syringe with wax until the coil is fully covered, press as much air out as possible, close the syringe and pull the handle to the top end of the cylinder, hold it in place and watch until the amount of bubbles coming out of the coil is negligible (1-2 min)......now the coil is vacuum waxed and should dry for a couple of hours.

The housing was made of a neck scrap piece using drills and Dremel. Further steps: placing the coils in the housing, soldering the coils in series, check if nothing went wrong by using an Ohmmeter, adding small neodym magnets to the pole plate and pour some clear epoxy into the cavity.


A little sanding finish and done. Great sound, super small, nice distance to the strings, building time 45minutes, less than 5bucks needed for materials (after learning how to remove the coils without breaking the wire :-).

Have fun

Al

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Comment by Poor_Richard on November 16, 2017 at 2:49am

Cool execution. i saw this at instructables but your version using wood as a housing looks sweet.

Comment by David Piasta on November 10, 2015 at 2:25pm

Could you post a sound bite so we can hear what those babies sound  like?

Comment by Paul Craig on November 10, 2015 at 1:06pm

I used to work in a alternator rebuild shop back in the 90's and though about doing a similar pickup out of old regulator coils. Never got around to doing it though.

The coils I had came from old GM generator regulators or first generation alternator regulars that were separate from the alternator.

Good build.

Comment by Al on April 27, 2015 at 7:13am

Wayfinder, with a little practice you can remove the coil in less than 2 minutes, nothing Special. I think they are assembled somewhere in China...unless you order 100000 a year you wont get them unassembled I guess.

Comment by Al on April 27, 2015 at 5:55am

Hi Emlas,

since the coil resistance can be an indicator (just one of many other parameters) for the output voltage of a pickup I more or less stumbled over the miniature print relay type I used for this project at my favourite, german electronics supplier (https://www.reichelt.de/Print-and-Plug-In-Relays/JS-24-MN-KT/3/inde...). The cool thing is that they publish the internal coil resistance of the relays on their website so I decided to try some with 2.35kohms each since I planned to use 3 of them in series (one for each string) which would be around 7kohm summarized coil resistance which is not so far away from a standard neck singlecoil. I built a quick prototype with a single relay coil and placed it under a single string test rig compared to the signal from a no name humbucker and heard no real difference at the same distance from the string so I decided to go with them for the three stringer.

The Neodym N45 ring magnets I used are 6mm in diameter and have a height of 2mm, quite small but they fit well between the legs of the coil. To determine the polarity I used a school magnet with a marked north and southpole, checked the wiring direction and placed the magnets according to this Image I found on the net:

http://imageshack.com/f/100/punw9.jpg

After finishing the pickup block I tested it again in the test rig and it sounds pretty well. But I wont tell you that this is the perfect super easy pickup until I finished the guitar where its mounted in. I will use an additional hand wound single coil with a three way switch as backup just in case the neck sounds ugly and when it does, who cares because at the current building stage you almost cant see that there is something inside the neck ;-)

I will post some pictures as soon as the build goes on and when it is done (may take a while because of some filigrane details I planned) I sure will post a video with some sound examples.

Comment by emlas on April 26, 2015 at 9:41am

Hi Al,

This is very interesting! A bunch of years ago I built a simple upright base and I found a couple of relays that i used for pickup. It worked out fine. The signal was a bit weak but they sounded good. I had really no clue of what I was doing and I guess I was just lucky. Later when I had a multimeter I tested the resistance in the coils and it turned out that only one of the coils had resistance enough to be able to pick up sound. Since then I´ve been trying to find relays that could work as pickups but i´ve never found any. This is extremely anoying and frustrating! Making pickups out of relay coils is such a teriffic idea! They are small, look cool and can be used for any amounts of strings you wish for, and they dont cost much. I´m surprised that there is so little information to find on the topic. Why isn´t everybody using them. It´s doable, you´ve proved it! There are so many parameters to look for when trying to find a suitable coil and now I´m wondering what the recipe is? My guess was that a 24v would be moore suitable than a 12v relay and also that you´d go for one with a high recistance but none of the ones that i bought and tested worked out. It worked for me once on my upright base but never again... So what´s the trick?

There are some pictures of my relay coil base and a video on my page.

/Emlas

Comment by Ron "Oily" Sprague on April 22, 2015 at 3:53pm
Kewlio!

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