Tim Mills on BKP Authenticity

ON AUTHENTICITY:

"I've compared our pickups to originals (I had Jimmy Page's No.1 in the workshop a few weeks ago, the most well known and expensive LP in the world!)-basically Stormy Monday, Mule and Riff Raff are complete clones of '57/58, '59 and '60 PAFs-all our materials are 100% vintage correct-we make our own solid nickel 21 gauge baseplates to the exact same spec as the first PAF, likewise our covers are complete replicas too, we use our own celluloid butyrate bobbins, again complete
clones of the original.As far as I'm concerned we make the closest replicas of the early PAFs in the world because we make them the same way and with the same materials-no one else is doing this anywhere. Some use the right wire, some hand wind but none have invested in the tooling to produce their own parts like we have and then looked at detail into the construction and winding methods of the earliest pickups. "

"Based on that, all our contemporary models are built on that original foundation but we use modern winds, ie different wire gauges, magnets etc for modern tones however the building block of each pickup is still the same as the original. We do exactly the same with our Teles and Strats-all the parts we make ourselves and we handwind with vintage wire just like the first Fender coils."

Tim Mills
President and Pickup Winder
Bare Knuckle Pickups