WIDE RANGE RETURNS

Fender just needed to remake the magnet…

The Wide Range humbucker was Fender’s answer to the Gibson design, famously designed by the same man, Seth Lover. But instead of being a close copy it was a fairly unique design, not least that it used 12 magnetic screw poles made of a material called CuNiFe (or Cunife), pronounced ‘cooni-fay’. While it graced numerous Fender models during the 70s it had disappeared by the 80s as the industrial use of the material declined – it had been mainly used in speedometers and tachometers for vehicles, boats, and aircraft until they became electronic – and CuNiFe became essentially unavailable.

Many pickup makers, including Fender, have since made attempts to clone the design without this special alloy – 20 per cent iron, 20 per cent nickel, 60 per cent copper. These copies, reckons Fender’s Tim Shaw,“simply don’t sound the same”. But in a two-year development, and with serious investment, Fender has exclusively remade the material and the ‘correct’ Wide Range is back.

“The factories making CuNiFe were shut down by the early 80s and in most cases the people who worked on them are now dead. So part of the two-year redevelopment was foundry level stuff,” Tim tells us.“We had original magnets so we could analyse them, but there’s a heattreating method that’s pretty esoteric and if you don’t do that right, it’s not magnetic. So while there is a body of knowledge about the metal, the knowledge of how to make it a working magnet was totally lost.”

The wide aperture humbuckers have a low inductance,“which is why Seth had to go with a bigger coil”, explains Tim.“So the wider those poles, or each coil, are apart the lower, the fatter the thing sounds. But because it’s not a very strong magnet there’s this almost hi-fi thing going on, so when you crank it up you never lose this kind of sparkle. But even when you drive it hard it doesn’t break up and crunch like other pickups do.”