tough work

[Susan Kline]

At 08:48 PM 3/20/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>tuned a couple of notes,and bamm,a broken string.A few more notes,another 
>broken string,and another.I let the pitch down first,even used a lubricate 
>around the hitch pins,and on the coils.I have never felt a string respond 
>in this manner,as,I would let the pitch down,and it would go down 
>smooth.But as soon as I tried to bring it back up,it wouldn't budge,and if 
>it did,bamm.Even a half step low,it still would not come back 
>smoothly,also this was in the low bass only.Has anyone ever run across 
>anything like this.


I had only one this bad -- a previous tuner had broken three bass strings 
(and TOOK THEM AWAY but didn't replace them!!! 
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) and about five treble strings. It was an 
Acrosonic, and I'd never seen such breakage on one. Investigating, I found 
that it had been made in 1943. All the broken treble strings were the same 
size of wire. I brought it to pitch, and replaced ALL the treble wire of 
the breaking size, measured for and replaced the missing bass strings, 
broke two more, replaced them, tuned, retuned.

What a pain. My feeling was that the wire during the war was bad -- in the 
treble, they had been able to use some old good stock, but had had to buy 
that one size new. All the core wire in the bass seems to have been bad.

Susan Kline