diy fever has a nice project site telling about how to make your own natural sustainer. a natural sustainer is a small amp leading to either a piezo or a voice coil, it takes input from the pickup of a guitar and amps it up before sending it it out to the guitar strings letting them vibrate to their own sound.

here is what they say:

Step 1
Find old single coil pickup. Humbucker can work too, but it takes more space and one coil will be unused. Another thought is to turn one coil to sustainer and leave other as regular passive pickup coil. That way you can have both sustainer and pickup, but passive coil needs to be switched off while sustainer is running to avoid hum caused by magnetic field around sustainer. My unsuspecting victim is old pickup I got from a friend. Not how a part of plastic is missing; it was “sanded” away with strings. That means I’ll have to buy pickup cover

Step 2
Strip pickup and remove all wire. There’s a lot of very thin wire there so cutting it instead of unwiding is the way to go. In this case, pickup was potted which made stripping wire even harder. Nice thing about this is that pole pieces can be adjusted, so if I end up with uneven sustain I’ll be able to set poles higher or lower to compensate difference.

Step 3
As Pete (psw from ProjectGuitar forum) suggested, the optimal coil height should be around 3mm. The pickup I cannibalized had 10mm high coil so something needs to be placed at ~3mm from top bobbin to limit coil height to around 3mm. I used thin (about 0.5mm) plastic which is used for packing stuff (mine was from guitar machine heads). Border of package was bended at 90 degrees, so I cut two L shaped pieces to put on both sides of pickup. It’s glued to core with epoxy glue and pressed with rubber band to cure.
This photo shows pickup after glue is cured.
While I was gathering parts for first sustainer a friend gave me four more broken pickups to play with

Step 4
Coil winding took about 15-20 minutes to complete. Using very nice online winding calculator (link is below) I calculated number of windings needed to get 8ohm coil with my pickup core. Each 20 or so windings I’d put a little glue on coil which should fill all gaps and keep windings tight in order to prevent microphonics. Glue I used is universal transparent glue that can be obtained in any office supply shop.

Step 5
When winding is complete both ends of coil are soldered to hookup wire (I used wire from PC mouse cable) and joint is insulated with heat shrink tubing. To prevent any stress on thin winding wire I glued whole joint to bobbin with nice blob of glue. That will ensure that any force will be taken only to hookup wire which is much stronger. I left glue to cure over night and wrapped coil with insulating tape.

Step 6
Next step is making sustainer circuit. For starters I decided to go with Fetzer/Ruby amp which is reported to give good results. I built it on perfboard and tried to keep it smaller because it will be placed inside guitar. I made perfboard layout for Fetzer/Ruby amp and you can find it in Layout Gallery
- diy fever - sustainer

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