John, For a piano of that size & quality, I think I'd go ahead and "bite the bullet" and order some metric wire from Mapes or somewhere. :-) You're probably going to run into a lot of metric wire pianos out there anyway. I just got 12 coils of Mapes best American wire ($67.80) and 12 cannisters for a total of $93.60 plus freight. I'm sure the metric would be comparable. I bought mine several years ago after I restrung the top two sections of our Hamburg 'D' with American wire before it occurred to me that it was metric. :-( I always have learned my lessons the hard way. The metric wire is designated with the same numbers as the American. That's what your numbers on the bridge are. But the sizes are not exactly the same for identical numbers. I'm not a scaling expert, but my guess is that if you're going to change to American wire, you probably ought to measure the speaking lengths and have someone rescale it. I don't know how much overall difference it will make, but there *are* some differences in the sizes. Below is a chart of the dimensions that Ray Chandler once did for Kawai. Hope it helps. Avery >I am restringing a Yamaha C7 and dont' have the original strings avaible to >mic sizes. > >The bridge is marked or string gauges, but I seem to recall that the Yamaha >gauges are metric and slighty different than American (i.e. a #15 isn't >always a #15) > >Is this true? If so could someone be so kind as to give me a conversion or >expaination of the marked brige numbers? > >Thanks in advance (as always) > > >John McKone, RPT >St. louis Park, Minnesota >(612) 280-8375 >mckonejw@skypoint.com METRIC DIAMETER NEAREST US # DIAMETER 13 .0305 13 .0310 13.5 .0315 13.5 .0320 14 .0325 13.5 .0320 14.5 .0335 14 .0330 15 .0344 14.5 .0340 15.5 .0354 15 .0350 16 .0364 15.5 .0360 16.5 .0374 16 .0370 17 .0384 16.5 .0380 17.5 .0394 17 .0390 18 .0404 17.5 .0400 18.5 .0413 18 .0410 19 .0423 18.5 .0420 19.5 .0433 19 .0430 20 .0443 19.5 .0440 21 .0463 20.5 .0460 22 .0482 21.5 .0480 23 .0512 23 .0510 24 .0551 24 .0550 25 .0591 25 .0590 ___________________________ Avery Todd, RPT Moores School of Music University of Houston Houston, TX 77204-4893 713-743-3226 atodd@uh.edu http://www.music.uh.edu/
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