Thanks for your reply. I have also been increasingly dissatisfied with Universal Strings. However, even ordering specific strings often pose troubled matches I've noticed lately. If I receive one more poorly matched string, I'm going to order both bichords... Anyway, I should also have known that since 2 complete notes were out, there would be no chance of replacing with Universals, since I need 2 pairs. These were indeed copperwound, and I'm afraid since they're at the break that the tension may be a bit high. I will ask the stringmaker if he can do something about that. I did not measure the adjacent strings. On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Joe DeFazio <defaziomusic at verizon.net>wrote: > Hi Noah, > As David Porritt mentioned, the hitch pins (and the bridge pins) will tell > you if you have a bichord or a trichord. However, some cheaper American > pianos of that era (and Currier certainly counts as cheap!) use both wound > bichords and steel bichords in the low tenor. So, if you see copper > bichords to the left and steel bichords to the right, you will have to look > carefully at the surfaces of the damper felt and hammer strike point, where > the difference will most likely be discernible. > > If copper is the "correct answer," I would advise against using universal > strings, which one of my friends calls "universally wrong." They never > match in timbre, and their inharmonicity is usually so wildly different that > they don't tune well with their neighbors. Why "fix" a piano so that it > sounds even worse than it did before it broke? (Yes, for the wise guys out > there, it is indeed possible for even a Currier to sound worse than it did > when new!) > > If you make accurate and precise measurements of the speaking length (hitch > to speaking bridge pin length, hitch to upper termination, hitch to tuning > pin) of the missing strings and their lower neighbors, as well as core and > wrap diameters for the lower neighbors, plus twist length near the hitch pin > loop, a good string maker ought to be able to scale and manufacture new > strings which will sound much better than universals. If four strings in a > row broke, though, that may be a clue that the original scaling was > improper. Ask the string maker to double-check the breaking percentage of > the newly designed strings before manufacturing them, and to adjust a little > for safety if necessary. You probably don't want to have the new strings > break just like the old.... > > Joe DeFazio > Pittsburgh > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090715/55332830/attachment.htm>
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