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

[capehead]

Have you built a pickup yet?

I've built lots; a bulk of them between the years of 1999 to 2006. As of recently I've built a bobbinless Burns Tri-Sonic style pup (still looking around for a proper cover), a pre-57' P-Bass style pup for my short scale Squier Bronco Bass, and I've wound 2 humbuckers; many more are planned for the future of course....

[salvarsan]

I'm going in there - I smell BREAKFAST ! ! !

Anyone have a recipe for groat clusters?

[John_H]

Hello seeker! Now don't feel alone here in the New Age, because there's a seeker born every minute.

Everything you know is wrong.

b..b..b.but I'm just a deep water diver and humble maker of things. These words of insulation formulas and magnet wire that are unobtainable to me make no sense. Only fools chase rainbows. I shall choose from the abundance of things that are available, and do the best I can.

I've built lots; a bulk of them between the years of 1999 to 2006. As of recently I've built a bobbinless Burns Tri-Sonic style pup (still looking around for a proper cover), a pre-57' P-Bass style pup for my short scale Squier Bronco Bass, and I've wound 2 humbuckers; many more are planned for the future of course....

Cool, that's interesting. Keep it up, but don't be obsessed with cloning vintage stuff. It's quite possible to make great sounding pickups without any secret ingredients or black magic.

[Possum]

Pickup making is full of mystery and wonder for me. If it was as simple as mixing cement I would have quit a long time ago. "Hype" is telling your customer a story and delivering something that doesn't match the words. Its a sure recipe for not getting repeat customers. I tell my own customers as much as I can share about the research work, but its the product that sells itself. Magnetism and electricity are totally VOODOO, scientists have not yet given us the Hoverboard we all want, they can't tell us what electricity is, they know how to use it but not what it is. Amps are even more voodoo than pickups are, there's an engineer who wrote a whole huge thick book on the 1959 Bassman amp thats full of math formulas, basically showing how everything interacts with everything else, and even now an original and a modern attempt to clone it are easy to tell apart ;-)

As for vintage wire, I have been winding with classic era PE for the last 6 months, sold several sets and kept one for my own. Its not like any wire we've ever had in about 60 years. Me telling you that, of course isn't going to convince you, until you do it and play it yourself. I know some reasons why it sounds different, and many not. Elektrisola didn't do any dielectric testing because I didn't have any continuous lengths of wire then, and their lab sheet doesn't have that listed as something to test for anyway. The old insulation is real grabby, you would hate it, it would break on your speed winders. But if you are seriously interested in replicating vintage pickups, you should know that you'll never nail it without that wire. When I started making pickups I swore I was never going to do replica pickups, why copy the past? Well, in the end the studying of vintage pickups of all types taught me an awful lot of useable knowledge about design and materials. But maybe I was lucky, I had mentors who helped me, right place, right time, started making pickups when no one cared about old humbuckers, am OCD enough that I spent more time doing experiments than I did trying to sell them.

The only way we'll EVER know why vintage wire is so great sounding is by trying to reproduce it. So, Bill Gates, if you're reading this, send me a PM and lets do it ;-)