I thought it was accepted now that Gibson didn't have a team of mexican ladies hand scatterwinding pickups (as Fender did, and anyway Gibson's factory was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, so the immigrants would be Germans?) but made their pickups on Leesona 102s. Given the Leesonas predated the PAF (i.e. for P90s) the idea they got a load of immigrants in to make them doesn't quite work). The appearance of scatterwinding is due to the fact that the Leesonas were pretty clunky and that the machinery created a level of randomness between pickups that modern winders don't have.
Personally I don't care - Scatterwound PAF replicas sound pretty damn good to me and, in particular, the PG Blues, Mules and Stormies all have the mojo.
http://home.provide.net/~cfh/seth.htmlThis was my understanding as well. Some bit down the page Seth Lover talks about the winding process of the production PAFs. Only the prototypes were hand wound, the rest were done with a machine with an automatic traverse. I've read other reports that I can't find the links to right now that basically say even todays machines aren't laying down wire very accurately. Of course, BKP and the rest of the scatterwound pup winders are able to take this to the extreme like no machine could and with their own signature flavors. That's the coolest part as far as I'm concerned. Some dude spinning wire on bobbin barely being able to see what the hell is going on and forcing that wire to go where he feels it should go and at what tension at that split second. Art.
