Standards
From Pickupedia
(this article is still a stub)
Guitar pickups may sound magical but their parts don't and surely aren't.
Wire and magnet manufacturors have unambiguous standards:
- the NEMA MW1000 for wire, and
- the MMPA-0100-00 for magnets.
These documents are available at:
Pickup makers care about these standards (or ought to) because they define what may be sold as AWG 42 magnet wire and Alnico magnets, to name a few examples.
It may not be enough to say that you want five pounds of #42 Formvar when the vendor needs an unambiguous description such as a heavy build MW15-C on five one-pound reels.
Similarly, not all magnet vendors understand guitar pickup builders. When you order alnico rods for the generic single coil form factor (e.g., Stratocaster), you may need to be very specific that you need cast isotropic Alnico II, pre-magnetized or not, diameter 3/16" (0.1875" +.000, -0.004 tolerance) length 5/8" (0.625", +/-0.004").
Why 0.004"? It's the diameter of the average brown hair.
A general resource of magnet information is MagnetWeb.
It contains technical tutorials and lists of magnet vendors.
A web page devoted to Gibson pickups and their various eras.
