Custom Pickup for Christian Allen Luthiery

Posted on May 24, 2022 by Scott French

Christian is a great local luthier and fellow Roberto-Venn graduate. He's been building some really interesting instruments recently and this is the third custom pickup I've made for him. For this project he needed a magnetic humbucking pickup to cover only three closely spaced strings.

This post gives you an idea of how these projects can go. I recieve some basic dimensions from Christian, then digitize those in Adobe Illustrator. From there I can export to SVG for use in a really simple laser using K40 Whisperer. In this case we used Alnico 8 Rod Magnets for a little extra output as well as some threaded inserts to make for a really solid pickup. From there we go to Coilton the Accuwinder with some 42 gauge wire. We went with about 8500 winds per coil for a total series output of about 6k ohms. Next is wax potting on the double boiler and then coil tape and assembly. The final product is a compact and solid pickup that should work well with the other elements being used on Christian's latest project.

You can checkout Christian's Website as well as his Instagram if you'd like to see his latest work. I'll update this page when the new instrument is finished.

Thanks for reading this journal entry! Feel free to reach out via email or join the discussion on Instagram.