String breakage

[Blaine Vesely]

I guess all these boards here with negative front bearing could be seen as 
a blessing--they have reduced my string breakage occurrences.

Blaine Vesely
Kent, Ohio

At 01:26 PM 2/20/03 -0500, you wrote:
>     Paul Revenko-Jones taught a nifty class a few years ago about
>termination points.
>     One of his ideas was that string breakage is caused by those moments
>when both the main string section wave and the front duplex wave are
>simultaneously "up," which produces the most extreme bend in the string
>across the front termination. Heavy and hard hammers will exacerbate this.
>     It is a progressive condition, like bending a coat hanger wire until it
>breaks.  If it takes 500 bends at x degrees, it doesn't matter if you do
>them all today, or space them out over a year.  If you can reduce the
>degrees of bending, you will get a lot more bends before the wire breaks.
>We also see 80 year old pianos with all strings intact.
>     This would very much support Vince's comments that once it starts, it's
>too late to do much about it, and that constant voicing is the way to
>prevent or delay it.  And that furious tuning blows add to the problem.
>     Paul, why don't you chime in?
>         Ed S.