wire splicing

[David Renaud]

Have You considered the following.

1) Practice on thin wire first, work your way up.
    I finally learned splicing the week before my tech. exam
    only because I had to. Now its my first choice.
    I ripped out some top octave string from a junk piano
    being pillaged for parts in my shop and used 12 gauge wire.
    A piece of scrap pinbock with two pins drilled and installed
    about a foot apart makes a good practice tool.
2)  Leave enough excess to be safe, you can trim it later.
3)  Are you using round nose pliers for the loops,
     I first tried needle nose, causing a kink in the wire;
     it encourages breakage.
4)  For large wire Use a half size up for your string segment,
     It has less chance of failing then with two identical diameter
     sting segments.
5)  Don't expect to close it up much by hand, in the beast.
6)  after a little practice you will have a reliable expectation
     as to how much the wire will stretch to judge to knot placement.
7) This can be done in a few min., makes it worth learning, the time
     invested with pay of many times over.
     Practice, practice............

pamela jenkins wrote:

> Hello all,
> I have been battleing with splicing new wire to some bass strings in an old
> console.  I experimented at home using the Reblitz book as a guide. I found
> the instructions to be inadequate. Either that or I am dim.  Anyway, once
> at the piano, I situated the broken string, bent the wire ( it took a while
> to figure out that I need loops of an adequate size, which left me little
> option for deciding where the knot would end up) Created the knot, but
> couldn't pull it very tight manually, measured three inches above the
> pin(which turned out to be way too much wire) and succeeded after 3 hours
> in tieing only one bass string.What an ordeal.
> Any thoughts on when to use splicing compared to replacing the string?  I
> am of the opinion that a new string is definitely the better way to go even
> considering that one would have to return to the house
>
> Also, is there a minimum length of wire that you would think needs to be
> left on the broken bass string?
>
> Thanks in advance, Pam Jenkins  Associate member, Maine