Cryogenic treatment of guitars warning

[the great waldo]

Hi All

I had a customer in yesterday who had his guitar treated cryogenically. After the treatment the front/neck pickup had developed a fault in one off the coils. It was a neck pickup from seymour duncan 8 string active blackout. the clonk test gave me a bit of output on one end of the pickup but that was it. I just wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with cryogenic treatment on their guitar/s?

Cheers

Andrew

[Rick Turner]

The Duncan Zephyr pickups are cryogenically treated.

And...I had three Kulesh Gibson Mastertone banjo tone rings and an F-5L mandolin treated "in the white" in 1989 when I worked for Gibson. The celluloid binding didn't like it at all! Much later I fixed the binding and finished it off. Sounded just fine, but I really didn't have a good control on the experiment.

I briefly had a small string company in the mid 1980s, and we were cryo treating bulk strings from Tom Vinci. I thought the strings did sound better, and they lasted longer. The process was to bring them down slowly to minus 360 F, hold them there, and then bring them back up. It was pretty deep cryo...much of what's done now only goes to minus 320 or so. Brass balls and witches tits, folks...

I imagine it can be tough on pickups if there are any bits of magnet wire already tight inside. The cold will shrink the wire and embrittle it while cold, and that could cause it to snap.

[J M Fahey]

What did he expect to achieve by submerging his perfectly good pickups in liquid nitrogen?
"Better tone" or some such nonsense?
He deserves it because of reading way too much silly advice on the Internet.
I don´t feel sorry for fools.

[Chuck H]

The OP reads as if the person had their entire guitar treated!?! WTF!?! Why would anyone consider that? Are there people out there that would do this to their guitar without doing some thorough research? I guess the answer is "YES". Whomever it was, they're damned lucky if all that went wrong was a busted pickup.

Hey guys and gals... STOP FREEZING YOUR STUFF!!! The ONLY materials used on electric guitars that may be benefitted are made of austenitic steel! Re read that. Repeat as necessary. This REALITY limits the benefits of cryogenic treatment to the frets, strings, possibly some very high quality locking bridge parts and perhaps some tuner gears. In the case of frets, bridge parts and tuning gears the benefits will be very small because the steels aren't highly austenitic. So that leaves the strings. YOU CAN BUY CRYOGENICALLY TREATED GUITAR STRINGS. There is no need to freeze the entire guitar to achieve this. You could even buy a set of your favorite strings and have them treated BEFORE you put them on the guitar. So, again, STOP FREEZING YOUR STUFF!

[the great waldo]

Hi Chuck
My customer did indeed have the whole guitar treated. I did notice that the plastic cover was separating from the resin/potting. I don't think that I would want to treat anything in that way.

Cheers

Andrew

[big_teee]

I think if a guy is going to treat the whole guitar, I think it should be a requirement that he must be playing it during the treatment!
Reminds me of when I installed new Phone offices.
We would build a tent around the equipment inside the office and jack the temp up to 120f Degrees.
That was the temp in the front aisles of the Equipment, about head high.
It was really cooking inside the Cabinets full of equipment.
So all we accomplished was making Marginal components bad, and making good components, marginal.
Sounds similar with the Cryo treatment.
T

[Mike Sulzer]

Medeical marijuana for guitars

It would be much more in keeping with the foundations of rock to soak the whole guitar in a suitable THC extract. The high price of this treatment would assure that it would make a world of difference!

Hi All

I had a customer in yesterday who had his guitar treated cryogenically. After the treatment the front/neck pickup had developed a fault in one off the coils. It was a neck pickup from seymour duncan 8 string active blackout. the clonk test gave me a bit of output on one end of the pickup but hat was it. I just wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with cryogenic treatment on their guitar/s?

Cheers

Andrew

[Chuck H]

It's my understanding that if you cryogenically treat your brain everything you have no longer needs cryogenic treatment.

[Rick Turner]

There is some evidence that deep cryo treating (which, by the way, is not in nitrogen but rather helium) affects other materials than austenitic steels where it does help the transition into martensite. In copper alloys it seems to close up surface porosity leading to less surface area to be attacked by oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, and other pollutants. It's also pretty well accepted in the banjo world for de-stressing bronze alloy tone rings, and a number of good players have "before and after" experience with this. The two banjo players who got the Kulesh tone rings (other than the one I kept) that I had treated loved the results. Rich Kulesh was the first guy to have vintage Mastertone flathead rings analyzed for a duplication of the exact bronze alloy.

Cryo treatments have become fairly normal in industries that use high speed steel tooling; and a lot of motorcycle racers have motor parts done. Ditto with carbide tooling.

Easy to dismiss. Not so easy if you have experience with the process. As with many things, I think most of the nay-sayers are dissing it as a knee-jerk reaction preferring to disbelieve. But it seems to me that if heat treating has an effect, then why not cold treating? It's been done for years with iron castings...left to season outside in winter:

Cryogenic Treatment of Gears - Gear Solutions Magazine

and re. non-ferrous metals:

www.energy.ca.gov/.../cryog_processing_...

DNP Global V-STARS Metrology Photogrammetry Coatings & Lubricants Cryogenic Treatment Machined Components Industries Non ferrous

I've not had the chance to test pickups before and after, but it would certainly be interesting to see if features like DCR at a given stable room temperature changes and if the resonant frequency moves. I'd suggest that folks not dismiss the process unless they do actual testing.

[Chuck H]

Gears, tools and dies are made of hardenable steels. I can certainly accept that some alternate materials made with heat as part of the processing might benefit from some stress relief with cryogenic treatment. These are physical properties. Don't expect any electrical properties to change. There's still the same number of the same types of electrons before and after treatment. Can cryogenic treatment alter things other than austenitic metals? Sure. So can heating them. For better or worse. That doesn't mean we should put bananas in the oven just because ovens make chicken taste so good.

[Rick Turner]

Chuck, have you tested cryogenic treatment? Or are you just knee-jerk reacting to something you don't want to learn about?

And do you not believe that physical properties affect electrical properties?

Whew. Nothing quite like a closed mind. I'd prefer to keep mine open. Call me a science agnostic in this area. If I can hear and/or measure a difference in materials, I try to find out why. And I don't reject stuff like this because of preconceived notions. There are more references on line to positive changes with non-ferrous materials with cryo treatment than to no or negative changes. My own experience tells me that there's probably something going on.

[salvarsan]

I once believed that referencing peer-reviewed scientific papers and surveys of them lent credibility to a reasonable assertion but what do I know? Most of us are impervious to reason, let alone new ideas, in the absence of persuasion less than a 2-by-4 smartly applied to the noggin or the nutsack. Nonetheless ...

Caveman summary:

• Guitar pickups often use Alnico magnets.
• Alnico has iron in it.
• That iron contains a little carbon.
• Iron+carbon compounds change with temperature.
• Cryogenic treatment changes the Iron+Carbon compounds in alnico.
• Changing the pickup magnet changes the pickup sound.

Alnico alloys are about 50% iron with trace carbon, among other elements. The alloys are heterogeneous, predominantly iron-cobalt crystals in a nickel-aluminum matrix. Searches on "alnico+microcrystalline+structure" confirm this.

Searching with "trace carbon in alnico" gives hits on manipulation of the microcrystalline alnico structure by annealing and varying the carbon content, i.e., manipulating the austenite/martensite/etc balance. Cryogenic treatment is another method, a well-documented one, for changing this balance.

It's reasonable to assert that cryogenic treatment of alnico changes it.

[Chuck H]

The tested and proven benefits of cryogenic treatment on non hardenable metals have been tiny or non existent. I do happen to know a bit about it, don't have a closed mind, am not afraid of research and also subscribe to scientific agnostism. You presume too much though I'll admit to occasional knee jerking only to find my information dated or incomplete.

As noted by tedmich above, there is an issue of different temperature coefficients that renders cryogenic treatment unsuitable for most assembled, multi material items that are fit tolerance sensitive. This would apply to pickups and certainly whole guitars. Even with moderated execution it's a bad idea.

As it applies to individual base materials, there are some techniques that use cryogenics as part of the process for non austenitic steels, but for reasons other than improvement of those materials. Some superconducting electro magnets are more efficient when operated at cryogenic temperatures. Not the same thing as cryogenic treatment improving electrical properties. Wiki indicates that cryo treatment reduces resistances and improves electrical properties of audio equipment. Whatever knucklehead put that in there would be very hard pressed to offer proof beyond the claims of the unscrupulous services that will cryo treat anything with a glad hand.

Bronze IS a hardenable metal alloy. Silver, some aluminums and copper are also hardenable. Not properly austenitic but these metals have shown improvements of flexibility and wear resistance in utterly ignorable amounts. But these tiny benefits exist, and are therefor marketable.

Some things might have changed since I learned anything about it. My information is about eight years old. I researched cryogenics when I started making knives.

[Chuck H]

Caveman summary:

• Guitar pickups often use Alnico magnets.
• Alnico has iron in it.
• That iron contains a little carbon.
• Iron+carbon compounds change with temperature.
• Cryogenic treatment changes the Iron+Carbon compounds in alnico.
• Changing the pickup magnet changes the pickup sound.

No iron contains any significant carbon. When iron contains any significant carbon it is called steel. I've seen research that indicates that cryogenic treatment of iron offers no improvements. It was a long time ago so I don't have the reference available. But before I trouble with a search I'll ask you, instead, to show me that iron, or even alnico, is improved with cryogenic treatment.

[Mike Sulzer]

I agree. All alnicos are not the same: this statement is based on measurements of eddy current losses in single coil pickups using alnico rods in the coil. I have not measured any cryo treated alnico, but given the magnitude of the differences based on different actual alnicos, I would need convincing evidence that such treatment matters.

and a completely worthless "reasonable assertion" unless you test and quantify it.