Bare Knuckle is a small, privately owned pickup maker based in Southwest England. Their specialty is hand wound pickups, and managing director of the company, Tim Mills took some time to chat with Gearwire.

Why would you say someone should use Bare Knuckle
pickups over other brands? What would be your "sales pitch"?

We hand make absolutely everything we do here using vintage correct
materials where applicable. Hand winding allows for a far greater
extended frequency response over mass produced pickups with better
depth and clarity. As guitar players ourselves, we're as addicted to
getting good tone as our customers and stop at nothing in that quest. I
personally offer in depth pre and after sales advice ranging from
correct pickup selection through to wiring into the guitar. I value
customer service as much as I do our pickups.

What are the primary ways your pickups are different from mass
produced pickups?

The main difference is in the hand winding and scatter winding of all the coils. Secondly the quality of our components, which we also hand make, is far superior to any mass produced pickup. We make all our own solid nickel silver baseplates and covers for humbuckers, all our Strat and Teles flatwork from Forbon etc. The attention is in the detail.

I notice you build a lot of vintage style pickups from original
specs. Tell me, someone who knows nothing about making anything more complicated than a sandwich, how you go about GETTING the specs. Where do they come from?

From studying the originals. If you're going to replicate anything you simply can't make a guess at what is going on, you have to do your
homework which means getting hold of original PAFs, early 50s Teles and
Strat coils etc and seeing exactly how they were made. To this end we've uncovered all sorts of elements that went into the first pickups which has driven us to fabricate our own parts as well as replicate the
hand winding techniques.

What materials do you use? Do you try to duplicate the materials used in the original pick ups?

As I stated in the previous answer, we produce nearly all our own parts these days - celluloid butyrate bobbins, nickel silver covers, nickel silver baseplates, maple spacers, rough cast magnets, pole screws, pole shoes, Strat and Tele flat work, P90 baseplates and so on. We've even tracked down the original manufacturers of the cloth hook up and braided hook up used by Fender and Gibson, sent them original examples of the 50s hookup and got it remade to the same spec.

What is next for Bare Knuckle? Are there new products on the horizon? Where can people buy your pickups in the USA?

More of the same. We're totally dedicated to continuing production of our pickups by hand, one at a time for our customers whilst expanding the range of models we have on offer. For instance we've just released the PG Blues humbucker set, a faithful reproduction of Peter Green's humbuckers from the guitar made famous by both himself and Gary Moore. Gary Moore has been using these on his most recent tour here in Europe. We're also looking to expand our signature range. We have a growing US dealer network now which is great.

You can find a dealer in the USA or abroad on the Bare Knuckle Website.