Custom, Metal & Classic Guitars is proud to bring you Bare Knuckle Pickups. Bare Knuckle Pickups is a privately owned business based in the South West of England, UK, specializing in hand-wound electric guitar pickups. Traditional skills and uncompromising values form the basis of a hard-working and forward-thinking company always ready to come out fighting and stand up for what it believes.
Every pickup Bare Knuckle makes is wound and made entirely by hand, in-house, by a dedicated team of pickup winders headed by Bare Knuckle founder and MD Tim Mills. Everyone at Bare Knuckle is fanatical about music and plays guitar either on amateur or professional levels. This is the way some of the other large pickup manufacturers used to do it when they first started out.
Bare Knuckle doesn't allow sets of hypothetical rules to determine how their pickups sound; they use their hands and their ears. All of Bare Knuckle pickups are designed, voiced and tested in rehearsal; in the studio; on stage; anywhere but on paper and always in the hands of a guitar player.
Time and price aren't the deciding factors in Bare Knuckle pickup construction - ultimate tone and reliability is!
Bare Knuckle Pickups are totally committed to producing the best sounding pickups possible supported by exceptional customer service so that you can get on with playing the guitar, knowing you've got the ultimate pickup for the job. After all, that's why they started in the first place and why they warranty their pickups not just for a few years but for life!
At Custom, Metal & Classic Guitars is committed to bringing you the best gear at the best prices. That is why we knew that Bare Knuckle Pickups would be the perfect fit. They have a pickup for every style of music. Browse around. If you have any questions don't hesitate to email us or call us. There are a lot of options to choose from so don't worry we'll help you through it.
Making the ultimate sounding pickups is our goal at Bare Knuckle and we don't do that by cutting corners. All of our pickups are completely hand-made, one at a time, and nothing but the highest quality is acceptable. We make each pickup to withstand a lifetime of playing and that life starts out with handwinding.
- Tim Mills, Bare Knuckle Pickups
Bare Knuckle uses vintage-correct materials in the manufacture of the majority of our parts simply because they out perform anything else and sound the best. This isn't an 'extra' or 'custom option', it's our build standard, irrespective of the voice of the pickup. So when you fit a Bare Knuckle to your guitar, you're fitting a pickup made with the best components in the world. If you are someone that likes to know the "how's & why's" keep reading. Here are some of the highlights which make all the difference in Bare Knuckle Pickups:
Components
Bare Knuckle uses vintage-correct materials in the manufacture of the majority of our parts simply because they out perform anything else and sound the best. This isn't an 'extra' or 'custom option', it's our build standard, irrespective of the voice of the pickup. So when you fit a Bare Knuckle to your guitar, you're fitting a pickup made with the best components in the world.
Bare Knuckle makes their own humbucker baseplates as a faithful reproduction of the original PAF humbucker baseplates with 21 AWG solid nickel silver, ½" long legs, 49.4mm pole spacing all correct right down to the original tooling marks. The pole screw holes are tapped for a really solid fit enhancing treble response, reducing microphonics and, together with maple spacers, make for a really strong construction. Utilizing the same materials we are also able to offer modern wide pole spacing and short ¼" legs to accommodate all humbucker applications.
Where Bare Knuckle brings a little something extra to the table, is with the use of specially annealed mild steel for pole shoes along with original electric steel for slugs and pole screws in humbuckers and P90s. Again all made to original dimensions, both slugs and pole screws are nickel plated to prevent corrosion while the effect of the heat treated steel is more magnetism conducted towards the string for increased power and definition.
Humbucker bobbins are made from celluloid butyrate to the same '50s PAF specification, exact in every detail and in authentic vintage colors and finish while 6 string humbucker covers are made from solid German nickel silver, again as an exact reproduction of an original '59 PAF humbucker cover. Bare Knuckle also make 7 string humbucker covers and, just like the 6 string covers, these are all available in a wide range of plates and unique finishes. Likewise the copper or zinc plated steel Tele grounding plates, deep drawn Tele neck covers and Strat covers are all true to their originals and all produced with our own tooling by our own engineers.
Bare Knuckle's #34 AWG/2 end braided jacket with 7/30 stranding of tinned soft copper hook up is made to genuine 1950s specification by the same factory that made it originally in the '50s, likewise the 7/30 stranding of bare bunch tin wax cloth 'push-back' cable used for both Strat and Tele single coils. Nothing beats these vintage hook ups for durability and tone however we also offer modern 4 conductor wire for maximum flexibility with our humbuckers.
The Alnico II, Alnico III, Alnico IV and Alnico V magnets are used in Bare Knuckle humbuckers and P90s are individually sand-cast, left unpolished and cut to vintage length along with a variety of custom-size alnico and ceramic magnets all magnetized for optimum balance of power and tone. As well as Alnico III, IV and V rod used in Strat and Tele coils we also produce the original generic low output Alnico used in the early '50s based on original samples we've had analysed and recreated. All Strat coils are available in '54 or '56 vintage-stagger and flat-profile options and Strat, Tele, P and J bass single coil formers are put together by hand, in-house with vintage-correct fibre board flatwork and hand-bevelled magnets.
Winding
Bare Knuckle scatter-wind the coils of each pickup one at a time with a variety of different gauges of enamelled copper wire; the gauge and type of wire insulation we use being dependant upon the sound we're after for each particular pickup. The majority of Bare Knuckle pickups are wound with the traditional plain enamel wire (or Heavy Formvar in the case of single coils) used originally in the early days of pickup winding, although they do wind with modern polyester and polysol wires too.
Scatter-winding can only truly be done by hand and represents a high degree of skill by the person winding the coil. Although time consuming, it has many advantages over conventional machine winding and mass-production, not least the far superior tone and dynamics produced. Bare Knuckle deliberately scatter the wire as they build up the windings of the coils so the wire isn't as even turn on turn, layer on layer, as with the more uniform wind of an automated machine with pre-tensioning. This lowers the distributed capacitance that exists between the turns of wire. Lower capacitance means improved high-end clarity, the resonant peak increases slightly and frequency response is greatly extended. The tension of the wire is also varied as it moves through the operator's fingers reflecting the ability to control the tension within the coil by the person winding the pickup. The result is a clearer, more open tone that has the impression of being louder purely by the amount of extra detail and dynamics present.
Potting
Unpotted coils have a very dynamic and touch-sensitive feel with a brighter edge which is well-suited to low gain playing, while potted coils have better feedback rejection and are much more practical for any playing style where high amounts of preamp gain and loud volume are used. Bare Knuckle do make pickups with unpotted coils as an option, although we lacquer the magnet and use paper tape inside the cover to help reduce squealing, just as in the early humbuckers.
Historically, not all pickups were potted but with modern high gain amplifiers and performance this isn't always practical. Nearly all Bare Knuckle finished coils are potted in a mixture of paraffin wax and bees wax to remove unwanted air trapped in the coil, solidify the windings and prevent microphonic feedback. All of Bare Knuckle's high gain models or any pickups that require metal covers are wax potted a second time to eliminate any chance of microphony.
Testing
Winding and constructing pickups by hand allows Bare Knuckle to be extremely meticulous in their quality control. They take continual DC resistance readings throughout manufacture to guard against a possible short or break in any of the coil windings and ensure consistency in performance from one pickup to another. Testing for microphony, correct phase and tone take place in a special test guitar before a final visual check and packing. Ultimately this means Bare Knuckle can confidently guarantee our pickups for life because that's how long they make them to last.
Is this extreme level of attention to detail worth it? We honestly think so, as it represents a colossal amount of extra work on Bare Knuckle's part researching, manufacturing and developing the parts and skills involved in creating what we believe to be the best pickups in the world.
All prices are in USD