epizootics wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2020 11:50 pmI use steel base plates in many of my single coil designs. They are a cool way to beef up pickups with a low turn count. Since they can be used to force the magnetic field to flow through a certain path, I've also been using them to emphasize the harmonic content of certain portions of the vibrating strings. I make a Rod 90 with 'half a claw' that can be oriented either towards the neck of the bridge, resulting in a change in the general color of the tone. It's a simple design, I'm surprised not to see it used more often.
This is fascinating stuff- if I was building pickups (at present I struggle to finish a guitar so I have to choose my battles), this shaping of the magnetic field is the sort of stuff I'd want to be playing with. Cool to hear what you're doing.
It is quite satisfying to make exactly what you have in mind for a particular guitar. You DO end up wasting quite a bit of wire at the beginning, but that's fun too. In the early days I spent days sketching up bizarre designs, some of which I still use today...and the rest of them ended up in a box labeled 'FAILED XPERIMENTS'. 