There are many types of winders being used by boutique guitar pickup builders these days.  My first winder was a version of the classic “Jason Lollar” style mechanical winder, with 2 sewing machine motors and a household fan motor as a gear down for the traverser.  You can see a picture of it in the homepage banner.  It worked well, but I wanted more reproducibility and flexibility in a winder. So, I designed and built a full-on CNC pickup winder.


I am not a programmer and haven’t taken any computer programming courses since the mid 70’s.  That said, I learned what I needed to learn to design and code the application and related interface in Visual Basic 2010 .NET application that runs my CNC winder.  I also machined all the winder brackets and mounting hardware.  It works beautifully!


Through the pickup winder application interface, my CNC winder can accommodate any bobbin height, set winder speed, turns per layer and wind in CW and CCW direction.


Lastly, I built a vacuum potting system to vacuum the pickups to the desired level.  Vacuum potting reduces or fully eliminates the microphonic aspect of guitar pickups.

The Winding and Potting Processes: