Back in 2013 I had gone down the pickup swapping rabbit hole and was having trouble finding a Jazzmaster neck pickup that would balance well with a Tele bridge pickup to go in the Jaycemade Guitars #8 Tele body I have. I reached out to some really good winders who were of course too busy being really good winders to fool with making a custom set like I wanted. After really looking at the pickups I had bought and seeing that there were parts available online I figured, "how hard can it be?!?!" I strapped a big hammer drill I didn't really use for anything else to my spare workbench, turned it to normal drill mode, put some 4-40 rod in the chuck and got a cute little 4-40 brass thumbscrew to hold the bobbin down and proceeded to waste a few pounds of coil wire trying to get a feel for how to guide it on the bobbin. It was a process to get the feel for sure, and then building up the callouses was another thing, boy did it burn at first!

The Jazzmaster bobbin was pretty forgiving to wind without a wire guide or anything else, so I wound a bunch of Jazzmaster sets just eyeballing how much coil was on there and trying to get a good difference between the neck and bridge. Tele was a trickier thing to learn. The early JM sets could be anywhere from high 5k's to high 7k's in the neck and high 8k's to well over 10k in the bridge. These early sets were all traded and bought and sold on the OSG or Madbean forum fs sections, and all was well and good until I started getting requests for another set "just like those other ones", my process was not at all repeatable except for winding beyond the desired DCR, and then unwinding coil wire by hand to get into the ballpark. More wasted wire, and the stuff isn't cheap!

Soon I built the first version of the winder I still use today, with an old White Sewing Machine Co. motor for drive power, and grey hammertone speed control box. Some robotics pulleys and bearings from Sparkfun were added, and voila, the "Wobbletron-White" winder was born. The first big upgrade was a digital turns counter, all of a sudden I could lay on a real accurate number of turns and get some consistent tone and output from one pickup to the next.

A number of pickups down the road I decided to rebuild the Wobbletron-White, first taking the winder off the workbench I had built it directly on and then putting it on a fantastic smelling repurposed bit of southern yellow pine shelf board, adding thick rubber amp feet underneath from a dead Peavey Classic 30 amp. This made it quieter so it wouldn't wake the babies at night with all the racket. Eventually I decided to get the driveshaft really well balanced and precise, but I found that took away a bit of the random scatter as the wire built up the coil on the bobbin. The previous driveshaft and bearings had more slop and wobble as it spun and the tone of the pickups suffered with the new tight and precise setup, so I really quickly changed back to the previous configuration. I haven't made any changes since then aside from occasionally oiling the bearings, and rebuilding the motor with new brushes a number of years ago.

Fast forward to today, and the formation of Sunday Musical Instruments LLC, the next chapter for Sunday Handwound Pickups. The Wobbletron-White and my hands are still the heart of the operation, it's still just me making them how I always have, but with freedom from the online marketplaces, and greater parts procurement capability. I believe going to the standalone website with more automated configuration capabilities will streamline my workday, and allow me to wind more and make a living at it going full time.

My current lineup of ready-to-ship and preorder semi-custom pickups were developed over the past 10 years of doing vintage pickup rewinds, research, endless prototyping, and winding countless custom sets to customer specifications.

The custom and vintage specs that I felt were really very special were developed into my ready-to-ship sets available here. I shoot for that worn-in feel and vintage tone profile with better balance across positions, high levels of versatility, and pricing that is accessible to the bedroom player, partscaster peddler, pool-hall poet, praise and worship gear fanatic, small scale builder/independent luthier, and professional recording and touring musician alike. Thanks for visiting and reading the whole story.