I've been playing the guitar for about two years know and though it would be kind of fun to try and make some pickups for an old guitar sitting around. However heres were i ran into difficulty I've tried to find sources on the Internet and i have scrounged up the necessary materials to built a very basic pickup the problem was that when i hooked it up it wouldn't make any sound i was wonder if you could send me any basic info into building one.

>> I've never tried to build a pickup from scratch myself, and I suspect that not many people ever have. The pioneers like Les Paul and Mike McCarthy probably did, but nearly all of the replacement pickup manufactures all admit that their careers started by repairing existing pickups, and then modifying designs until they settled on some favourite variations, now sold as their customised pickup range.

I suggest you visit sites (which you've probably already done) like http://www.seymourduncan.com/ and read music trade magazines to get as much info as you can. Lollar Publications have a book with details on winding your own pickups.

The basics are that the guitar strings need to pass through the magnetic field of the pickup, and there needs to be a large number of coil windings also within the magnetic field. You need to be careful not to break the fine wire used for the coil; you can check this with a DC ohm-meter. You would usually expect to measure a DC coil resistance of 5K ohms to 10K ohms for a single coil pickup. If its really high (or unmeasurable) you have probably broken the wire in the coil somewhere. If its a lot lower you probably don't have enough winding. If all is OK, you should be able to hear something.