finished (?) results

Some pics of the finished pickup, installed on the "little harp".  My final winding job was 2000 turns, measuring 5.04 kOhms.  The volume control is a 500k linear pot, mainly because that's what I had on-hand.  It'll probably be mostly used either at full-blast, or turned down to zero to mute the instrument.

Such a large single-coil pickup naturally has tons of hum susceptibility.  Inconveniently, it seems that the best position to cancel the hum is with the harp held in a vertical position.  To really use this in a live setting, it'll probably be necessary to fashion an adjustable bracket for it, that can attach to a mic stand or similar -- or, maybe a music stand would work.  Either way, there's only one position where the hum is acceptably nulled out; in all other positions it's unbearable.  So this is instructive, vis a vis using pickups like this on a harpsichord.  I think I'll probably have to develop some form of humbucker design.  Maybe not the traditional guitar-style side-by-side kind, though: some more obscure designs from the early days of electric guitars put a second coil inside the body of the guitar, at some distance from the "live" coil.  But this is a good first start, anyway...







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