[pianotech] Question about 19 1/2 wire

[Ron Nossaman]

On 4/12/2012 2:26 PM, Al Guecia/Allied PianoCraft wrote:
> I am restringing a piano that calls for 19 1/2 wire (2 note - 6 strings)
> near the tenor break after 4 notes (8 strings) that are wound. I find
> that I am out of 19 1/2 (.044), so I borrowed some wire for another
> tech, that wasn't tagged. I measured it and it reads (.0435). Might be
> metric? What do you think, use it or wait for the 19 1/2, .044?I don't
> think .005 will make mush of a difference, but it is at the break and
> that causes me to worry. I hate thumpy sounding wire strings at the break.


Al,
There will always be people who will recoil in absolute horror that 
someone would even consider using a wire size that isn't precisely 
identical to what was there originally, whether what was there 
originally was measured to anywhere near this level of accurately or 
not. If you were to bother to check, as metric/english charts have been 
provided on this list at least a dozen times since you've been here and 
you must surely have saved one, you would find that #20 metric is closer 
than #19 1/2. Or you could ORDER what you want and wait a couple of days 
to get  your EXACT heart's desire. But everyone demands instant 
gratification without inconvenience, let alone actual work or waiting, 
right?

Will what you have work? Yes. Will it be detectably different than the 
EXACT match. No, at least not by anyone in a blind test. Will the low 
tenor break be thumpy? If it was before restringing, YES, certainly! The 
reason as I and others who have bothered to learn something about 
scaling have said on this list repeatedly is that the low tenor string 
lengths are too short for the required frequency and the break% of the 
wires too low. We have also repeatedly said that changing wire sizes 
will NOT fix this, as the break% does NOT realistically change with wire 
gauge changes. Fixing it requires changing bridges (therefore speaking 
lengths), and wishing otherwise won't change the reality.

Regarding rescaling. As we've also said repeatedly on list, the big 
benefits to rescaling are in the wrapped strings, where the broader 
choice of wrap and core gives some control of the outcome. Relatively 
very little in the way of improvement is possible in the plain wire 
without changing speaking lengths. Anyone posting scaling questions to 
the list - ever - needs to learn something about what they are doing 
instead of soliciting one answer to one question and going back to where 
they were.

That's it, the same old answers recycled yet again. No need to save it 
though. Someone will ask the same thing again in a few weeks and we'll 
start from scratch once more.

Ron N