Hi gang, I have a question. What dark and obfuscatory forces are behind this plot to further impede communication among techs attempting to exchange information about string bearing angles and forces? Baldwin is pushing the concept of percent of tension as a bearing measurement. When did this start, and by all that's unnecessarily confusing - WHY? Sure, you can know immediately what the bearing load is with any given %tension by multiplying the tension by the given figure, but who wants to know that when they're specifying or setting bearing? Only the people who have done some redesign work on the assembly are going to be remotely concerned what the bearing forces actually are, so who is this "simplification" for? You can get the functional equivalent by taking sin(radians(angle)) * tension, but you have to use one of the infinitely dreaded Trigonometry functions to do it. Sure, you can take sin(radians(angle))*100 and produce the new and improved %tension figure for any given angle, but what if you want to know the angle and all you have to work with is the %tension thing? Just take degrees(asin(%tension/100)). Simple, right? Isn't it bad enough that we have to do a chapter and a half of clarification and conversion when someone quotes bearing in thousandths of an inch or millimeters of bridge height above the agraffe/aliquot plane and is under the impression they have conveyed useful information? What the heck is wrong with degrees as a bearing measurement? The Lowell gauge gives you handy little 1/6° increments, which looks like 0.2909% of tension per graduation. Simple as can be, right? Being progressive is all well and good, but why must we progress into yet another layer of unnecessary confusion when we already have a simple and universally applicable standard that means the same thing to anyone, anywhere - if they would just use it? It's a matter of degree. Ron N
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