I was recently called in on a Merrill runt grand (a no-SN Jacob Doll orphan) which holds the promise of making the middle-school age boy learning on it happy and enthusiastic. The main complaint, dead bass strings, was taken care of by twisting the bass (2 turns for the bi- chords, 1.5 for the singles). Three days later, I get the call: "the strings are dead again, just like before the twisting". Yes, they sounded as if they'd been twisted in the wrong direction. I quickly found out that the twist I'd put in was still present, and (at my age, this deserves double- checking) in the right direction. I told the owner that I wouldn't have been surprised, with such dead strings on a low-budget piano, to find that the core wire had lost its torsion, but I had no explanation for how this turn-for-the- morgue could happen, but with the torsion intact. So I picked a single and put 2.5 turns on it. I told them, "If the wire is really incapable of carrying torsion, this will be dead by tomorrow morning (as the first twisting was). Let's wait three days to find out whether it's clearly time for a new set of bass strings." I got the call back yesterday that the twist had held its tone. So in this situation where I've run out of expertise, I thought I'd dip into the communal well. Anyone have this happen to them? Anyone know enough about the physics involve to suggest why the standard benefit from twisting vanished overnight, while the twist remained? IOW, should I trust 2.5 turns where 1.5 didn't work? TIA Bill Ballard RPT NH Chapter, P.T.G. wbps at vermontel.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100508/d29723a3/attachment-0001.htm>
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