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Found this on a from discussion on Suhr Pickups.Do you know who that magnet company is?Could we get those magnets , too ?
Well here is a little true story. Back when I was working there I did a lot of research on the old pickups. I even used to hand wind pickups on one of the old winders. It had a cam traverse that wasn't adjustable so I didn't use that part of it. I also made Jeff Becks pickups on that winder. Anyway I built some guitars and pickups for Mike Landau since I had a relationship with him from working with Bob Bradshaw and he was one of Bob's many customers. As much as I researched and chatted with the ladies who actually wound the old pickups like Abby, I was unable to convince Landau that they sounded as good as his real deal 61 pickups. I even counted turn by turn layer by layer researching the winding patterns on good old pickups and never could make Mikey like it. Funny thing is when I rewound an old pickup Mike loved it, that left the obvious. One day I sent some old magnets out to the original supplier who made them for them in the 60's. I was fortunate enough to develop a relationship with one of the original engineers at this company (unfortunately now retired). He also happened to save samples from batches that they made every time and still had some from the 60's. Even though they were Alnico 5 the exact manufacturing process changed in the 60's to eliminate the chipping on the edges of the magnets. Basically Leo complained they were too chippy and didn't want to grind the edges of the magnets since that was very labor intensive and still is for anyone who does it they can confirm. What they changed in the process to make them able to cut the rods easier also changed some of the properties of the magnets. My new friend at the company confirmed the samples I sent were still fully charged and had the identical properties of the samples he had on file. This difference nailed it for Landau and I didn't even mention it was a different magnet. It becomes more giving in response, I like to call it smokey, aged sounding even though no loss of Gauss. We use this special magnet made in the USA on all our pickups including the humbuckers. Unfortunately nobody else is using this so it costs me 15x more per magnet than my old employer pays. I'm too paranoid to even try anything else and they continue to raise the price on me every year. That is it in a nutshell. Everything else we do isn't really anything different than others, we play around with tension, winding patterns (to alter the resonant peak) and wire gauge, coating specs etc. All of that gives us variations but the foundation for me are those magnets
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