Re: Wiring Question
Basic audio hook up wire can be divided into two broad types; single core and screened. In the US screening is called shielding but I will continue to refer to it as screened because it is easier to spell and a better descriptive term (just as I always refer to signal, return and earth rather than hot and ground).
Both types of wire have a core wire, which may be single or multi strand surrounded by insulation which is most commonly a polymer such as vinyl (PVC) or occasionally neoprene. Teflon is just another type of polymer. Teflon is better than vinyl or neoprene as it has better heat resistance and is also tougher.
In the 50s and 60s electrical insulation was commonly made from braided cloth so the stuff that Artie and I have alluded to was a multi strand wire with braided cloth insulation. Sometimes this is waxed to improve it's performance in low energy audio applications. Recently variants of this have appeared impregnated with silicon rubber in place of wax. This is good stuff, but a little harder to work with than the old cloth covering. You'll find it on Kent Armstrong pickups.
PVC coated wire is easy to work with. It cuts easily and works well with automatic wire strippers which struggle with Teflon and don't work at all with cloth (the trick with cloth insulation is to push it back slightly to expose the core rather than cutting it as it tends to fray) but vinyl tends to melt when the wire heats up. This is a problem when using screened cable with vinyl insulation as if you get the wire too hot at the point where the screen and the core separate you can get a short. Teflon and cloth bound wire are both sufficiently heat resistant for you not to have to worry about this, but they are not as flexible as PVC covered wire which can go down to very small diameters. Teflon and cloth bound wire makes very robust connections though.
You can get all of them from Stew-mac, Allparts and WD.
If you do not have cavity screening
(see this link) then you should definitely use screened cable throughout.
If you have
good cavity screening then you probably won't need screened wire for hook up between pots or from the pickups and unscreened (discrete) hook up wire is probably easier to handle and quicker to work with which is why most manufacturers use it regardless of its vulnerability to noise.
