bareknuckle

How we make them Making the ultimate sounding pickups is our goal at Bare Knuckle and we don't do that by cutting corners. All of our pickups are completely hand-made, one at a time, and nothing but the highest quality is acceptable. We make each pickup to withstand a lifetime of playing and that life starts out with handwinding.

Winding
We scatterwind the coils of each pickup individually with varying gauges of enamelled copper wire, the thickness of the wire and type of wire insulation we use are dependant upon the sound we're after. We wind the majority of our pickups with the traditional plain enamel wire used originally in the early days of pickup winding.
Scatterwinding by hand can be time consuming but it has many advantages over conventional machine winding, not least a far superior sound. When a coil is scatterwound, the wire isn't as close or even, layer on layer, as with a machine and this lowers the distributed capacitance that exists between the turns of the wire. Lower capacitance allows more top end through, the resonant peak increases slightly and the pickup has a flatter frequency response across its range. The result is a clearer, more open sound that has the impression of being louder purely by the amount of extra detail and dynamics present.

Potting
The finished coil is potted in a mixture of paraffin wax and bees wax to solidify the windings and prevent microphonic feedback. We wax pot all of our pickups and any that require a metal cover are wax potted a second time to eliminate microphony.

Components
The types of materials vary dependant upon the style of pickup but we always use the highest quality components throughout, even manufacturing a lot of parts ourselves to guarantee consistency and reliability. For example we hand machine our humbucker pole shoes, cut maple spacers by hand and even make various types of pickup baseplate too. All of our Alnico II, III, IV and V magnets are individually sand cast, unpolished like the originals and along with our Ceramic magnets are all the correct longer vintage size. This ensures a better balance of power and tonal character. For hook up cable we offer a choice of shielded 4 conductor, original vintage correct braided 7/30 cloth 2 conductor or original 7/30 cloth 'push back' cable to provide maximum sonic flexibilty and integrity.

Humbuckers all feature solid 21 gauge nickel silver baseplates, soft iron pole screws and slugs along with machined pole shoes and maple spacers for a sturdy, reliable construction with the minimum of treble loss and unwanted microphony.

Strat and Tele single coils are hand made using classic Forbon flat sets and sand cast magnets. Tele bridge pickups feature copper plated brass or solid nickel silver grounding plates and original cord wrap. Bare Knuckle soapbars and dogears all use nickel silver or brass baseplates and soft iron pole screws.

Testing
We take continual DC readings throughout manufacture to guard against a possible short or break in any of the coil windings and ensure consistency in performance from one pickup to another. Winding and constructing our pickups by hand allows us to be extremely meticulous in our quality control. All of our pickups are finally checked against michrophony in a special test guitar and to make sure they attain the unrivalled sound we demand. Ultimately this means we can confidently guarantee our pickups for life because that's how long we make them to last.