After months of refinement, the GFW-80 is everything we set out to achieve for Jim Gaustad: the "brown sound" of Jim Gaustad's authentic but modded DiMarzio Super Distortion pickup, but with the look for the double-black bridge pickup found in Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar after the recording of "Fair Warning".  Jim had modified his authentic 70's-era DiMarzio Super Distortion the way Eddie had before using it in his Frankenstrat to record the "Fair Warning" album: he removed the ceramic magnets and metal bars, and inserted a short Alnico 5 magnet.  Jim believes that, after using the modded pickup to record "Fair Warning", Eddie had a pickup-maker make for him a tone-clone of that pickup, but wound on black bobbins with one row of screw poles and one row of slug poles, on a nickel-silver baseplate (instead of the brass baseplate used for a Super Distortion). 

Jim asked ToneSlinger founder Paul McKeever to do the same for him.  So Paul took Jim's modded Super Distortion pickup apart, measured everything, and reverse-engineered it sonically.  Paul discovered that a significant element of the tone of that pickup was due to its asymmetrically-magnetized Alnico 5 magnet, so I created a way of replicating the asymmetric magnetization too.  The result: the GFW-80 Asymmetric - a tone clone of a modded DiMarzio Super-distortion, with the look of a Gibson humbucker.

Jim says "I'm 100% convinced that this is the one", for getting that elusive FW tone. He has explained that most humbuckers that are used to get the VH tone are made for people playing in their bedrooms or at low volumes.  But when one turns up the volume - for example, when one plays through a 100 watt Marshall Super Lead, as Eddie did - the low-end from those pickups is too loud to get the proper tune.  The GFW-80 gets the right tone, even when playing at concert volumes.