nicovlogg wrote
Man I am SUCH a sucker for handwound pickups.
Depends on the winder. Some of the smaller guys are faking it, but the well established small builders who have stayed small are usually worth a try - (Lollar, Kinman, Mare, Fralin, Novak, et.al.). They are not always the best thing for a specific taste (I have pickups from three of those builders, but also one from DiMarzio and a pair of Toneriders...).
BTW Alan, any idea why exactly CuNiFe is so rare?
It's not a rare material - it is often used in other applications - however it is rare in a form usable as pickup magnets. It has to be manufactured to nearly finished size and only machined the last little bit, which means stock has to be custom made for pickups, rather than just buying the standard stock sizes and milling to size. Which means you have to commit to a huge production run and it will still be relatively expensive.
I expect Fender must have had a sizeable amount to consider it viable for pickups?
Actually, it was because that is what Seth Lover specified - partly for tone, partly because it was a permanent magnet that could be machined and partly because it is very corrosion resistant. Having regained market dominance (thanks largely to Hendrix) Fender was trying to get a slice of the big G's market too, so they ran with it.
Seth Lover saw it as an advance of his humbucker design with all the benefits from both single-coils and humbuckers, keeping the clarity brightness and attack of Fender pickups and the extended low end, power, noise rejection and adjustable polepieces of his PAF design. CBS Fender dropped it in the late '70s when their stocks ran out, because they were all about production line standardisation and cost cutting.
