Fred Sturm wrote: > All pianos and harpsichords have foreshortened scales. It doesn't > take a spreadsheet to see that if you strung a piano with 13 wire > throughout, the tension would decrease as you went down the scale, and > the percent of breaking point would also decrease. And that the same > thing would be true if you started at the point where any other gauge > began and strung the lower portion of the piano with that gauge. > Or is there some fallacy I am missing in this reasoning? You mean other than the fact that changing gage size on any given speaking length at a given pitch will change the calculated tension, but not the break%. I don't really care, nor do I see any connection. That single note in question doesn't care either, what the guys an octave away are doing, or how any of the rest of the scale is constructed. These are Sanderson's (I think) formulas for piano wire: Lin is length in inches DC is wire diameter in 0.001" T is tension in pounds T=((Freq*Lin*Dc)/20833)^2 This is break% Break%=T/(0.2528*Dc^2) Pick a string length, pitch, and multiple gages, and go for it. Ron N
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