I have recently "made" ( or assembled ) two electric guitars, but also became fascinated with the pickups - the electromagnetic transducers of string vibration to signal. I wanted to "roll my own". The most immediate problem there is, while the parts are easy to obtain, the desired winding of the copper wire on the pickup coil is very difficult to achieve without expensive equipment.
Interestingly, there has been a good amount of experimentation and design implementation using various types of magnets - but very little of such work has been done with the coil wire (for a number of reasons). I discovered that Litz wire should be quite suitable for this purpose - and since it is composed of multiple strands (woven in parallel), it can be done by hand - requiring only a few hundred turns rather than a few thousand. So - I made my first one today!
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