String things

Pianos have a lot of strings.  Mine has 231.  There are 42 wound strings in the bass section, and 189 in the treble.  When a piano is designed, someone puts a lot of thought into the lengths and gauges of strings.  Ideally, all of the keys should produce notes with similar tone and volume to the adjacent keys, without any harsh transitions when the string gauges change.  I don't know enough to attempt to make any changes here, so I will be copying the current string gauges and buying identical replacements.  That was the plan, at least.

Can you spot what's wrong in this picture?  It isn't easy to tell, but the pair of strings on the right are not the same gauge.  The gauges of the strings differ by 0.005in.  When you look at them up close, you can see that the windings on the string on the right are larger than the one on the left.  They are both struck by the same hammer when the A2 key is played, and although they can both be tuned to the same note, the overtones they produce will not be identical.  It's a careless mistake made by a technician who fixed a broken string many years ago and replaced it with one of the wrong size.  This is not the only location where I found strings of the wrong gauge, but in all cases I can tell which size is correct, so I will be able to order the correct size when I replace them.

If a string was replaced with the correct gauge, it should be impossible to tell the difference, right?  You would hope so, but there is a skill to stringing a piano, and poor workmanship is obvious right away.  My piano book, in the section on evaluating a used piano, says to make sure "each string is wound neatly around the tuning pin three times, forming three neat coils."  The picture above is an example of repair work by someone who must not have known the basics of piano stringing.  In addition to the ugly coils, the tuning pin is visibly higher than the others, which means it will be looser and not stay in tune as well.

In the next installment:  hammers and regulation!