PRS says PAF covers were stainless steel???

[JGundry]

Here is a picture of a 57' Les Paul that has no sticker PAF's and it is claimed to have stainless covers. These covers don't seem to have any tarnish but the hardware has very tarnish also. Clearly these have either brushed or buffed surface. I would think that considering the age that these would have tarnished some if they were nickel. I have never had a PAF with this kind of cover in hand but clearly Gibson used brushed and not plated covers for a short time. The close up photo has a color buffed raw cover on the left buffed the way Gibson did it in the 50's.

[Possum]

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I don't think they are brushed, its just the natural grain of the nickel silver. All my raw covers look like they were brushed but they aren't. I had a '60 PAF in here that had very thick nickel plating on it that was actually flaking off in big chunks. Underneath the texture of the cover was the striated horizontal lines like all the raw covers have, and on this one the lines were even deeper, maybe why they plated it so heavily....

[Possum]

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Are you sure those are the original covers, its real hard to tell from that photo, no details. I'd be curious to see what the solder joint looks like....

[JGundry]

The guy claims they are original.

The grain was buffed out completely if they were plated. The grain you see could really be the buffing marks. I have seen guys that used to buff Gibson covers do it in person. It is pretty aggressive. The pinch trim burr along the bottom of the pickup is essentially buffed away.

[Possum]

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Not on the one I saw, very coarse horizontal grain under thick nickel plate.

[JGundry]

Not on the one I saw, very coarse horizontal grain under thick nickel plate.

The course grained nickel is prefinished. You pay more for it. Try plating a prefinished one and see what happens. Trust me, they were buffed. The place I use still has the fixtures they used to hold the covers during buffing for Gibson back in the day. Gibson had to have other parts buffed like tailpieces bridges, studs.. Buffing raw parts before plating is just part of the prep for plating larger parts.

[Rick Turner]

I think it's possible that some prototypes were done in almost anything, but when I asked Seth about nickle silver vs. anything else, he was pretty adamant about nickel silver being the right choice; he absolutely hated the idea of plated brass, by the way. Stainless would have very different magnetic and eddy current properties than NS. I think it's clear that what we think of as the PAF sound includes nickel silver covers.

BTW, Seth gave me a couple of vintage 1/4" phone jacks for restoring my 1933 Loar ViViTone acoustic-electric Spanish/Hawaiian guitar, one that was personally owned by Loar and given to the gent from whom I purchased it. Mag pickup, bridge sensitive, very interesting...

[Joe Gwinn]

Stainless would have very different magnetic and eddy current properties than NS. I think it's clear that what we think of as the PAF sound includes nickel silver covers.

Actually, some kinds of stainless steel have the same skin depth versus frequency function as nickel silver, so it may be possible to get a reasonable match.

[Rick Turner]

Interesting...

Still, a royal pain to solder to...

[Plucky]

Solder stainless? No problem...

[Joe Gwinn]

Still, a royal pain to solder to...

Stainless steel is easy to soft solder, but one must use a flux intended for stainless. Rosin and plumbers flux are not aggressive enough. Tinners flux works, but fluxes intended for stainless work even better. The low thermal conductivity of stainless makes for easy soldering once the correct flux is used.

For covers (baseplates), I would pre-tin the spot where the cover will be soldered to the baseplate (cover), and wash the flux residue off with hot water. When the pickup is built, solder the cover to the baseplate using ordinary radio solder (with rosin flux) at the pre-tinned spot.

[flyneye]

Stainless would have very different magnetic and eddy current properties than NS.

Because of my previous job in aircraft metal salvage I can verify that stainless has very little and mostly no pull to magnets. Nickel on the other hand mags quite nicely in all alloys I've run across. Logic says SS covers exist as pretty bobbin covers,perhaps purposefully to be transparent to the process and NS is part of the pickups sound. I guess it would widen the field as opposed to just the field coming off the pole pieces.

[Rick Turner]

There are magnetic stainless steel alloys...which one would not want to use for pickup covers. Look at some of the stainless steels with nickel in them rather than the chromium alloyed types.

[David Schwab]

Because of my previous job in aircraft metal salvage I can verify that stainless has very little and mostly no pull to magnets. Nickel on the other hand mags quite nicely in all alloys I've run across. Logic says SS covers exist as pretty bobbin covers,perhaps purposefully to be transparent to the process and NS is part of the pickups sound. I guess it would widen the field as opposed to just the field coming off the pole pieces.

As Rick said there is magnetic stainless. Check out most of the stainless flatware you might have in your kitchen. Every stainless steel knife I have is magnetic.

I have used some magnetic stainless for pickups. I wasn't crazy about the tone in the particular application I was using it in, but it might be good for something else. It was bright sounding.

Nickel is indeed magnetic. Nickel Silver doesn't have all that much nickel in it, most of it being 60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. I have picked up NS pickup covers with strong neo magnets; but just barely.

[flyneye]

Yeah, I'm aware of flatware. Chances are though unless you go out of your way to get ferritic SS you are probably going to wind up with good ol' barely magable 300 series SS.
Most sheetstock you run across will be 300 series. Ferritic SS tends to be for machineable applications and cast parts. Martensitic SS starts getting too expensive and still more likely to find solids than sheet. If you have some examples of SS and NS covers it would be interesting to hear the results of dangling a magnet near each to assess the pull of each.
I actually would've figured NS to be a plating on a ferric part. I mean NS in sheet isn't outrageously expensive, but I would certainly look for less costly alternatives if I were a large manufacturer.