Explain Pickup Rewinding To Me

[Masoo2]

Title - looking to change out the pickups on a fanned 8 I have and it seems that rewinding may be a simpler (and maybe cheaper) alternative to ordering a custom angled set.

If I was to commission this through someone like Lundgren, would it be as simple as saying "hey, make the bridge an M8 and the neck a Black Heaven 8" and send my pickups over to Sweden?

Are there any major limitations to rewinding? If the pickups are two conductor, are they able to be rewired when getting rewound into four conductor? Is the pickup effectively gutted and solely the baseplate carried over the new wound?

 

[ElysianGuitars]

Yes, most brands should be able to rewind them to whatever model you're looking for. Only concern would be what style of pickups the guitar has, if they're some of the lower end rail style multiscale pickups they may be glued together which causes issues with teardown. I've had to build entirely new pickups before because I couldn't effectively teardown glued together pickups and reuse the parts.

 

[bostjan]

The pickup is the combination of the inductor (wire), the magnet(s), and the mechanical structures that support those items, plus whatever potting material is used. The idea behind rewinding is to gut the non-mechanical parts of the pickup and reuse the mechanical parts, essentially. I'd say that it's generally not any more economical than getting a new pickup, but if your pickups are slanted or otherwise have odd dimensions, it might cut down on the tricky and less-interesting parts of constructing a pickup. Obviously, if the pickups are slanted a lot, it means that the windings will be significantly wider, and the magnet won't cover as much cross-section of the strings as it would non-slanted, so it's practically impossible to get an exact replica of, say, a Lundgren M8 as a 30° slanted 5" wide multiscale pickup.

It can also be a major pain for the people winding the pickup in those sorts of cases, since their jigs might not be able to fit something with crazy dimensions, but expectations seem to be a lot more flexible than they were ten years ago when I was more actively talking with pickup companies about stuff like this.

Luckily, now we have guys like @ElysianGuitars (whom I personally recommend), who don't seem to bat an eye at stuff like this.

 

[gclef]

Look into zhangbucker. He does rewinds and makes custom angled stuff at very decent prices