Pickup for Selmer style guitar
Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:36 am
I've got a cheap knockoff Selmer/Maccaferri style guitar, and I wanted to amplify it. Pickups for Selmers are special purpose and expensive, so I decided to take a crack and making my own.
My main requirement is that whatever I made couldn't include permanent modifications. There's not much room under the strings, so I decided the best solution was a pickup/bridge combo. I made a steel base plate and mounted a coil from an Epiphone humbucker. The coil is held in place by the pole screws. It was important to use pole screws so I could adjust for the lower output of bronze wound strings. There was no room for a magnet below, so I mounted it alongside the coil in a channel in the plate - the steel holds the magnet in place, and the magnet magnetizes the steel plate and the poles. I used a couple of screws mounted from underneath to be the bridge posts. Finally, I sprayed the base plate with some bronze rustoleum.
As you'd expect from a pickup mounted so close to the bridge, it's very bright. Kind of goofy, but it works!
Here's the result:
View from below:
And mounted:
My main requirement is that whatever I made couldn't include permanent modifications. There's not much room under the strings, so I decided the best solution was a pickup/bridge combo. I made a steel base plate and mounted a coil from an Epiphone humbucker. The coil is held in place by the pole screws. It was important to use pole screws so I could adjust for the lower output of bronze wound strings. There was no room for a magnet below, so I mounted it alongside the coil in a channel in the plate - the steel holds the magnet in place, and the magnet magnetizes the steel plate and the poles. I used a couple of screws mounted from underneath to be the bridge posts. Finally, I sprayed the base plate with some bronze rustoleum.
As you'd expect from a pickup mounted so close to the bridge, it's very bright. Kind of goofy, but it works!
Here's the result:
View from below:
And mounted:
