Home made sustainiac

Lesgrandepotato

Whilst wiring up my Tele today I had a plan. So it turns out in my sparks box there is a load of vero board and a 741 style op amp or two. So as I wired up the three pos switch an idea came to mind. If I had a five pos switch I could switch in at the extremes an amplified signal back to the pickup that wasn’t in use... the use of an pickup should clean the signal to a degree so a rough and ready op amp circuit should do it. 

What’s wrong with my logic? Should i just start making this :-) 

ICBM

If it was as simple as that, why would you need a special pickup with a Sustainiac?

Lesgrandepotato

Is it a special pickup? Or is it just a split pickup one side to drive and one to recieve? 

Sporky

It is special - it generates a big enough magnetic field to move the strings. 

impmann

Google it. 

Its not rocket science.

A mate had one built using the Run Off Groove Ruby circuit as a pre amp and had a specially wound energiser coil fed from the ‘speaker’ out.

He did have some issues but I remember it worked pretty well.

Steve922

I did see a YouTube video about a home-made sustainiac. I was thinking about creating one myself for my boy to play with. The real thing is SO expensive.

ICBM

Steve922 said:

I did see a YouTube video about a home-made sustainiac. I was thinking about creating one myself for my boy to play with. The real thing is SO expensive.

When you work out how much complexity and design effort was necessary to get it to work properly with a wide range of guitars, be easy(ish) to fit and reliable to use, I don’t think it’s expensive at all. If you try to build one yourself I think that will become obvious before you get anything that actually works.

On the other hand, if you want cheap then a small solid-state amp, a 2” radio speaker and an elastic band to hold it to the headstock will work as a DIY version of the original model...

Lesgrandepotato

Agreed, the real thing is not unreasonably priced. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a crack at building something that doesn’t have to be consumer grade. 

WezV

The driver coil uses much thicker wire than a pickup, and a lot less turns.  It can't double as a normal pickup.

I have some memory about being warned that you will kill a normal pickup if you try and use it as a driver coil.  Not sure how true it is as I never tried it.

thermionic

I would guess that a driver coil has a high current flowing through it, hence the thicker wire. A normal coil would melt almost immediately.

Try making a homemade E-bow?

Nomad

A normal coil will have much more resistance, which should dramatically limit the current. The result should be insufficient energy to move the strings, but no damage to the coil.

Ebow type things work like a pickup at the detector coil (high impedance, low current), and more like a speaker at the driver (low impedance, higher current). It may be the case that the driver doesn't need a magnet, but can use a ferrite rod to help concentrate the field.

I was looking into making a hexaphonic one a while back and that's about as far as my research got. I think it fell away at the prospect of winding loads of little coils, not least making enough to do two pickups because a mate was going to do the electronics, so a total of 24 tiny bobbins to make, plus prototyping as a single string Ebow type of thing. There's also the whole making it fit into something that's the size and shape of a pickup. Quite a lot of experimentation and design involved.

ICBM

There won’t be anywhere near enough power in a battery-driven circuit to damage a pickup coil - especially given that the typical DC resistance will limit the current to no more than a couple of mA - but I wonder if it might not be impossible for it to degauss the magnet over time.

olafgarten

This doesn't exist yet, but looks interesting. https://www.keithmcmillen.com/labs/strongarm/

olafgarten

This guy also made a DIY version by making a Strat bobbin shorter and using around 120 turns of 0.2mm (32 AWG) wire.

http://diy-fever.com/misc/diy-sustainer/

HarrySeven

Talking of hexaphonic pickups...which we kind-of were...I always used to wonder if the Roland GS-500's pickup was made from modded tape heads...

HarrySeven

More info here

And here...

ICBM

The symbol on the schematic does look like the usual one for a tape head!