Using Aluminum Magnet Wire to Simulate the Lower Quality Copper of Yesteryear?

[capehead]

This is all very interesting stuff to know Possum and J M Fahey! Despite my initial theory (aka uninformed shot in the dark, lol) that aluminum wire might be a suitable equivalent to older magnet wire has been completely bunked, this conversation about where the differences actually lie is a far more productive conversation I think. From what I've gathered in my extensive re-education in the finer points of modern pickup winding, there seems to be 2 schools of thought ; one is the the scientific approach and the other is the all mojo factor. This is of course not limited to just pickups either as the same differential applies to almost everything music equipment related such as amps, effects boxes, ect. With me when it comes to pickups, my mind is firmly set on understanding the scientific reasons of why things are and were the way they were which added together to create an inspiring sound. Philosophy aside here, I am quite curious to know a bit more about the characteristics of older wire, less for the sake of wanting to be yet another winder chasing the original PAF/Fender sound but more for the sake of adding a touch of that vintage vibe to some of my more modern/wild ideas. I had a thought in regards to the manufacture of wire today; like most industrial manufacturing these days it seems that much of the magnet wire made is being produced in China. From what I've seen/heard from other industries that were once produced in western countries which are now made in China, is that many of these companies use the same type of older equipment which was salvaged, refurbished and shipped over and the older the equipment is, the cheaper it generally is. The thought I had is that perhaps one of these super discount Chinese manufacturers with some of this older equipment might be able to produce wire that is closer to vintage spec almost by accident with all the inconsistencies which may be undesirable for most end users but may work out well for us. As for the copper quality itself, aren't the Chinese infamous for cutting more valuable metals with cheaper types for the sake of stretching their product? Perhaps this aspect is something that could also be exploited within a reasonable degree of repeatability.....

[big_teee]

If you are in the U.S. and buying Electrosola, or AWC wire, they are both made in the U.S.
IMO the biggest effect of wire on tone, is bare wire size, (Ohms per Foot).
And outside Wire diameter (OD).
Most of the old wire I've had anything to do with made in the USA has always been soft and near pure.
The wire inconsistency, issue, I Want the wire to be uniform in size.
If it is not consistent in size, IMO your pickups will not be consistent in tone either.
As far as Aluminum, I can't where it would be usuable for Pickups.
T

[Possum]

They didn't tell me what impurities were, you could look up older copper refining practices from the 40's-50's and probably find that out. Basically though, you've got conductive copper with probably non-conductive material peppered throughout the mass. So the effect would likely be something like considering that there is lesser useable mass of copper vs. overall bare wire diameter. In other words we'll never know what the effect is without some seriously well funded lab work ;-) There are some things I won't share from the lab work that I prefer to keep to myself for now. The dielectric rating of the insulation is of supreme importance, they are not making PE coatings the same way they did back then, and I am guessing the materials they used were cruder and more organic than now. I did track down an Asian wire maker that I still have a fair amount of wire from, just recently, the wire was made around 2008 and could easily be mistaken for vintage wire, all the right things are there and it sounds nothing like wire of the same diameter that Elektrisola is making. Elektrisola is a German own company, probably why their wire is always dead-on the same every time. Anyway, the Asian manufacturer said they only made one batch and did't get a re-order for the PE. It'd be a shot in the dark to have them make it again, as I'm sure they have modernized since then. China would be a good place to look, but PE just isn't used by anyone anymore except for pickups, so you might not find it there at all.

[Mike Sulzer]

T Basically though, you've got conductive copper with probably non-conductive material peppered throughout the mass. So the effect would likely be something like considering that there is lesser useable mass of copper vs. overall bare wire diameter.

The conductivity of a material as a function of its constituents is a lot more complicated than that, but I agree that it would be very difficult to know everything about old copper wire. And I am not sure the exact conductivity is really the issue since so much of the loss in a humbucker, for example, is in eddy currents in the steel cores.

[salvarsan]

At some point, stuff is no longer antique or vintage -- it's just old, its age more important than any real or imagined functionality.

If your craft is replicating old technology, then your market inevitably has a lot of frauds because of unprovable provenance. Instead of selling a serviceable product in replica form (kudos, Throbak!), some purveyors sell cachet+exclusivity, things very subjective. For the ethically impaired, the payoff is worth it. Antiqued PAF decals, anyone?

Hardy Rodenstock fooled the wine collectors and wine press for 20 years with thermally-aged new wine in old bottles. The labels, made with an inkjet printer and old paper, were cleverly distressed to simulate age. A gradual accumulation of small discrepancies which, taken together, obviously indicated fraud even to ignorant wealthy people were what finally curtailed his rare wine business. One of Rodenstock's victims was a Koch brother.

I got pretty sick of hearing about the imagined superiority of JRC4558 op amp in Tube Screamer type circuits. With JRC4558 fervor frequently bordering on religious, it was possible to sell a $75 stomp box for $300. Those economics made it hard to tell the hucksters from the true believers.

Nobody cares enough to prosecute frauds in the musical electronics industry.

If you can't make a good-sounding pickup with modern materials, you probably shouldn't be in the business.

[Possum]

Quantifying what happens in a humbucker vintage or new, is just impossible. One slightly different batch of steel is enough to change everything, software simulations don't even take into account metallurgy.

Vintage PAF's are not a product of aging at all, though the braided shield wire does age and age badly, if you disconnect the lead you hear a dramatic difference alot of times. They are a product of materials that don't exist anymore, technologies that are gone, materials that aren't from the same sources. You're up against the same problems in vintage amps, materials that no longer exist, capacitors, resistors, coils that can't be duplicated and that DO age under high heat and high voltage.

Fraud is rampant in the music industry, guitar players are gullible, so they may get all excited, for instance, about buying a "reissue" amp that no manufacturer would dare demonstrate side by side with what its supposed to be a copy of. But advertising stories eventually get debunked and word gets out that the texts don't match the reality and reputation is lost. In the commercial world "good"is good enough...But these commercial failings leave the door open for people like me, who put in too many years figuring out one single vintage technological artifact until its understood and techniques invented to bring back what was lost as much as possibly can be. I know amp builders like that, I'm having a JTM45 replica being built with alot of NOS parts by an old guy from my generation who now makes his living restoring classic vintage amps, who has studied endlessly the amps that he and I grew up with; first demo's of it sound so very close to his own mint '65 JTM45, yet he is endlessly tweaking things to get it closer, thats really what it takes in the end, is obsession just for the pure love of it.

[capehead]

They didn't tell me what impurities were, you could look up older copper refining practices from the 40's-50's and probably find that out. Basically though, you've got conductive copper with probably non-conductive material peppered throughout the mass. So the effect would likely be something like considering that there is lesser useable mass of copper vs. overall bare wire diameter.

Call it a hunch or just another shot in the dark but I've been doing a bit of reading in my free time on the copper production process and one thing that has stuck out with me in all of it has been the historic challenge of removing the sulfides from the raw ore at a minimum of copper loss; so perhaps the impurity in question was sulfur or some other non or less conductive material? If this is the case then it wouldn't be the wire producing companies themselves who can change the metallurgic properties of their wire but rather the people who dig/blast the stuff from the ground and refine it. One thing I'm sure of is that modern copper extraction is a rigidly established and complex process with no means of being easily altered, so inquiring from this point to make any changes would be impossible. This prospect doesn't kill the idea though; option 1 would be to again look at China as there is still a technological gap in many parts of their industries and some refineries might still be using the old methods. Option 2 would be to find somebody who can smelt clean copper and mix into it the appropriate amount of impurities and cast ingots of the right size which will fit into the drawing machines of a wire manufacturer willing to use it. Either idea is complicated in their own ways but the second one might actually be less of a risk and potentially more consistent. The way I see it is that if wire can be made to have the same electrical characteristics as vintage copper it wouldn't just be the individual/small business pickup winders who would be most interested in a product like this, I can easily see Gibson, Fender and Seymour Duncan being interested so long as the supply was consistent in quality and availability; and don't forget vintage style transformer winders would be all over that also.

[Possum]

I don't think its the impurities that has the biggest effect its other things that can be changed, but the problem is no magnet wire company would want to do it. They all basically make their bare wire stock all the same way, they just coat it with different insulations, so you're screwed from the start. You have to find an old plant that hasn't progressed too much and it won't be in this country, so then you got language problems, danger of being ripped off, danger of miscommunication and spending alot of money to get something unusable. Wire is a big piece of the vintage PAF puzzle, but its not THE "secret." No one element is. Hey, if I suddenly win the lotto, I'll on this one the first month, forget the fancy cars and dream houses, magnet wire is more important, ha ha...

[J M Fahey]

Agree that parts and materials change with time, so also changes end result.
I'm quite certain that magnetic materials change a lot, if anything because of the alnico problems in the 70's , when cobalt went from just another somewhat expensive metal to unobtanium , forcing alloy chemistry to change.

Iron itself (polepieces and screws) has changed less, if anything, because standard iron processing (not talking hi tech steel here but common humble generic stuff) has been stable for way over 100 years.

And copper has changed the least.

Worst quality copper is 98/99% pure and I'm quite certain (although I couldn't find dates mentioned) that in the 50's all copper used in wire drawing was already electrolytic refined , so 99.9% pure.

In fact i guess it was so already in the 20's or something, go figure.

My point is that difference in **copper** alone is nil, and at worst might be expressed in a less than 1% change in resistivity ... not significant at all.

Even wire drawing diameter shows larger variation than that and definitely has a larger influence.

My point is that I wouldn't lose sleep on that, and concentrate on other parameters which I guess are far more significative.

Maybe somebody can find and post when electrolytic copper refining started being used

As of the chemical ore refining itself, we are working with worse material than before, simply because the best ore got mined first.

New processes allow producers to use , say, 1 to 5% rich ore, when older ones used 10% or higher, but that does not affect us directly: no matter how long and tortuous path it took to reach it, the end of the process is a big chunk of 98/99% "chemical" copper which is electrolitically purified into 99.99% , which is what wire drawers use ... and I guess also used in the 50's .

[Possum]

Nope, steel making has changed quite noticeably since the 1800's, there are no longer sweaty guys shoveling chemicals into an open hearth inferno. Your common hardware screw in the 1800's, late 40's was nearly pure iron. During the 40 year time span we analyzed of Gibson pickups, covering all the classic pickups they made, the screw poles changed alot, I can see that Gibson didn't understand what was happening, and I saw them try various things that didn't work. TTops were born because the classic PAF formula didn't work anymore. The wire didn't work anymore. I had a '64 early patent set in here where they made one last attempt to use PE, the pickups were so shrill the customer had me replace the wire and all the metallurgy, they really were screechy pickups. '65 also shows up in the wire data, that they changed something in how they made the wire, it got alot brighter, am still not sure exactly what happened. Modern magnet wire is pure copper. TTops radically changed the winding pattern, bobbin geometry, and type of magnet wire, yet they stuck with pole screws of '65 and had to adapt to what had changed in all of that stuff.

You only have to wind a modern bucker of any type, and put all vintage PAF magnetic circuit parts in and you'll hear a very noticeable difference. The steel is significant, thats all I'll tell you. The wire was significant, the magnets not so much but it was part of it too. You can go buy all the equivalent metals, use modern PE, choose your magnet, put it all together and it doesn't work, you don't get old PAF tones out of that kind of simple thinking. In the 14 years I've been working on this subject, the deeper I got into it the more complex it became, its like building an amp, everything affects everything else and everything counts. Its good to come up with theories but without experiments its just fantasy until you prove or disprove your theories. I did thousands of hours of wacky experiments thru the years, you need a small machine shop to do that, you really have to go way outside the box to eventually figure out what actually works if you're trying to replicate a vintage product, and there are serious obstacles you'll never get past, but its good to know exactly what those obstacles ARE. All of that is what I call FUN, worse than drugs for me ;-)

[salvarsan]

The market for buggy whips is small.

[Mike Sulzer]

TTops were born because the classic PAF formula didn't work anymore? The wire didn't work anymore.

Do you have any evidence that anyone at Gibson determined that "the classic PAF formula didn't work anymore." Do you have any evidence at all that that the "PAF formula" was anything other than what Seth Lover designed for engineering and manufacturing reasons, making sure that the sound was close enough (and that does not mean very close) to P-90s so that guitarists would not reject them, and materials were affordable and readily available?

[LtKojak]

Do you have any evidence?

Mike... it's Possum.

You're asking HIM for EVIDENCE?

Really?

[Possum]

Yeah the buggy whip niche is very small and not real profitable, but they always sell and people always want them who appreciate old buggy whips ;-) Different markets and different agendas.

Gibson didn't call them PAF's, or TTops, they were just humbuckers. I've worked and dissected and had parts destroyed on the 40 year window we looked at, so I've been inside all those pickups I mentioned and make replicas. You get familiar with those pickups and you see things they changed, sometimes small things, or big changes like TTops were; some changes were gradual. You see the same thinking in the same years, for instance, minihumbuckers made the exact same changes PAF's did when TTops came along, black and white coil leads, dramatic wire type change, dramatic coil winding pattern change, the same metallurgical changes. The early Patents were getting brighter than previous PAF's, the worst one I had here was the '64 with PE, which is remarkable because from '63 onwards they pretty much used poly nylon types of wire. I have heard of others finding these '64's and they will shatter glass they are so bright, horrible pickups. Did they just have some old wire left over and decided to use it? I don't think so because its not the same PE as they were using earlier, noticeably different color and insulation feel, and no these weren't rewinds, totally virgin when I opened them. I don't think Seth had anything to do with TTops, or if he was even there then. If I remember right worked three different year periods for Gibson then went to G&L or Fender, I haven't looked over my history books in awhile. Those guys weren't dumb, I have an article where Seth said they wound to a certain inductance, in other articles he said they just filled the bobbins. They knew what inductance was back then, yet in interviews he doesn't know zip about metallurgy and said he only got his steel in the Gibson stock room, it was just steel to him, so another sign they didn't understand that steel making was changing. There was just as many types of steel back then, go read an engineer's materials book from that period and you'll see. Probably some of the changes were to save money, after all poly nylon is cheaper than PE, at least it is now. So, no I can't point to one person there, don't really need to, you look at the real thing in front of you and see engineering changes with purpose behind it, who was dicating these things we'll never know. To me, the most fascinating pickups Gibson made were the P13's, they tried all kinds of crazy wacko things, they were an attempt to make something cheaper than the Charlie Christian pickup, which was a beautiful pickup on its own, but totally hand made, handcrafted; I have a vintage piece of maple from the old Kalamazoo factory with CC pickup tops that had been pinned to the wood to glue the bindings on and there are 3 CC pickup tops still glued to the wood. The first P13 is called a "knuckle grater" and is a T-comb thing with square teeth cut out of thick steel blade, sunk into a paper bobbin with 2 magnets like P90's use. Then they went to pole screws sunk into a solid steel core in a paper bobbin, the last one was paper bobbin and a bucker magnet bar tipped up vertically as a blade. They did all kinds of funny things like varnish the magnets, wrapped them in paper tape, maybe for microphonics, no coil leads off the coils at all, just soldered to posts. I think Walter Fuller was the guy who simplified the whole mess down to one plastic bobbin, 2 magnets and the big steel core or T blade turned into a small pole keeper, and the P90 was born, a work of genius.....

[SpareRibs]

Hello,
After several years of reading all of the posts about all of the super secret findings and research, I would just like to know, how will it be known when the authentic PAF sound has been captured. Given all the variations incorporated into them over the years, even by Gibson. What is the standard that will judge the final results. How will any conclusion be drawn and by who.
It is just my opinion that all of the best qualities, from the wide range of sounds, from all the different years, could be combined to create a reproduction PAF. I would be looking for a pickup that has a rich full sound, with clarity. I would certainly not be looking for a not potted thin sounding pickup, prone to feedback, that you have to acquire a taste for.
Maybe I am missing something.