Square magnet wire

[JoshG]

Has anyone ever tried it? I'd love to hear about your experiences and results if you have.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

I've seen listings for it in catalogs and have been curious myself. My guess is that it would be poorly suited for "random wound coils" and would only be useful if you're going for as even of a coil as possible, which never happens in guitar pickups, even when "machine wound".

[salvarsan]

It's often used for electromagnets, voice coils and stepper motors, and so forth.

[Ronsonic]

IINM, hex core wire was the shiznit for extreme spec chokes at one time. Be absolutely bonkers to try to stack that perfectly in 42ga, sorta like stacking BBs. Nevermind that the added inductance is exactly the direction we're trying to avoid usually.

[Tom Phillips]

Be absolutely bonkers to try to stack that perfectly in 42ga, sorta like stacking BBs.

Yep.and I doubt that it is available in sizes smaller than 30AWG.

Square wire is used when you need to maximize the copper in the available coil area. As mentioned above, you need to take special care to align the square sides to each other as you wind. The final result is a coil with less wasted empty space in the stack and the ability to fit an equivalent number of turns of heavier ga wire into a given space than would fit with standard round wire. This is usually only of benefit for power magnetics. Edge wound rectangular wire speaker voice coils are another application.

Cheers,
Tom