‘57 vs ‘59 Stratocaster pickups: different?

[roger bayliss]

Hi Roger,

Girls counting windings.....Is this a serious remark or are you joking
Did you ever see how fast these machines turned???
There are still several original windings machines at Fender and Throwback pu's has purchased a original used by Gibson winding machine.
Fender used a counter, and at the time the pre- set up windings reached the right amount, the machine was stopped by hand and also automatic later on in the 50's.
Gibson machine was equipped with a clock-timer, when the bell ringed....it had to be stopped by hand, so when a operator was to quick or to slow....less or more windings are the outcome....
That's why the PAF pickups are so irregular in tone and strength!!!

Cheers Rob

Guess I was being a bit flippant Rob. There is plenty of evidence of pickups being over wound and under wound and the early hand fed coil wonders certainly had counters on them , but my guess is it still required the operator to stop the machine at the right point . So a human factor is present on deciding when to stop the wind as the machines probably were not capable of stopping themselves at the required number of turns back then.

So maybe the girls doing it repetitively would likely to have got a little bored and not watched the counter closely and stopped either side of the required winding count.

[Uncle Fiesta]

It has been said that the reason why the original PAFs sounded so good, was because each of the two coils sometimes had wildly different numbers of turns on them!

[roger bayliss]

It has been said that the reason why the original PAFs sounded so good, was because each of the two coils sometimes had wildly different numbers of turns on them!

Another thing was the so called 50's wiring on early PAF circuits , which in effect is a type of treble bleed circuit which help with the brighter sound.