Electric Mandolin Update
Previously on “Electric Juniper Mandolin” I reported poor results for my home made pickup. I am happy to announce today that the second pickup I made has proved successful. I made the second one from the same design. The one difference being that I was actually able to accurately count the number of turns on the coil itself. Easily done with a cheap electronic calculator and a magnet switch, plus some ingenuity. In this case I was shooting for 6500 turns however coil was closing in on my connecting pins so I stopped at 5500. One thing I learned along the way was that apparently most pickup manufacturers use the 6500 based on the theory, that the resulting larger coil gets too far from the magnet itself.
So with the newly made pickup and a set of nickel plated strings it tested positive. The pickup is hearing all sets of strings evenly with no excess volume from the A strings as before. There you have it, the mysteries of science. The first pickup had as few as three thousand turns based on my guesses vs. the actual count. I had phosphor bronze strings on before. Of these few differences something worked.
I will fine tune this and get some audio posted and list it for sale soon.
