Attila Barath wrote:
The VRS100 wilkinson PU are ok ish certainly not Seth Lovers famous PAF recreations as Trev Wilkinson markets them.
I found
this article..
Designer Trev Wilkinson says: “This was a fun project, to take a player’s dream and turn it into a fantastic guitar. Ash loves the sound of the Fret-King custom-designed PAF, that’s for sure, and there’s a great story behind that pickup for sure, ‘cos I didn’t 'design' it!”
“When I used to have my manufacturing facility in Fullerton, CA, back in the '80s, we were close to the aviation company Rockwell, who used to clear out stuff they didn’t need every Saturday morning in a yard sale.”
“One of these Saturdays, I picked up a surplus – but still fully functional – armature winding machine, great for winding the Wilkinson USA pickups we wanted to start doing back then... Lo and behold, in one of the many books about Gibson in the '50s, there was a picture of the very same machine, being used to wind coils at Gibson.”
Trev continues: “Now, it gets spookier... A few weeks later, one of my guys was at a swap meet at Santa Ana, and happened across an elderly gentlemen selling old tubes, old radios bits and such like, who turned out to be no less than Seth Lover! They get chatting, and the conversation, now my buddy knows who he’s talking to, gets around to the armature winding machine, and Seth remembers that very same machine from the 'old days', and asks if he could go see it for old times’ sake!”
“To cut a long story short, Seth finished up at my place in Fullerton, chewing the fat about 'stuff', telling a bunch of stories about the politics of the old days, and how the bean counters and management eventually got in the way of making great pickups and guitars, and exploding a few myths on the way! He was also generous enough to go through the fine detail with me of how to make the definitive humbucker, which I have to say was pretty cool!”
“So, we make our humbuckers – like the one in the AGB – which we use in quite a few Fret-King and Vintage® guitars, exactly the way Seth described to me. Not ‘our version’, or a ‘bean counter’s version’, just the original recipe, including Alnico V bar magnets, solid nickel silver cover and base plate, and plain enamel wire, the specified number of turns, etc. That means that when you plug the guitar in, you’ll hear what the designer intended, and just what you’d expect to hear...”
Quite interesting.
