Hi Noah, As David Porritt mentioned, the hitch pins (and the bridge pins) will tell you if you have a bichord or a trichord. However, some cheaper American pianos of that era (and Currier certainly counts as cheap!) use both wound bichords and steel bichords in the low tenor. So, if you see copper bichords to the left and steel bichords to the right, you will have to look carefully at the surfaces of the damper felt and hammer strike point, where the difference will most likely be discernible. If copper is the "correct answer," I would advise against using universal strings, which one of my friends calls "universally wrong." They never match in timbre, and their inharmonicity is usually so wildly different that they don't tune well with their neighbors. Why "fix" a piano so that it sounds even worse than it did before it broke? (Yes, for the wise guys out there, it is indeed possible for even a Currier to sound worse than it did when new!) If you make accurate and precise measurements of the speaking length (hitch to speaking bridge pin length, hitch to upper termination, hitch to tuning pin) of the missing strings and their lower neighbors, as well as core and wrap diameters for the lower neighbors, plus twist length near the hitch pin loop, a good string maker ought to be able to scale and manufacture new strings which will sound much better than universals. If four strings in a row broke, though, that may be a clue that the original scaling was improper. Ask the string maker to double-check the breaking percentage of the newly designed strings before manufacturing them, and to adjust a little for safety if necessary. You probably don't want to have the new strings break just like the old.... Joe DeFazio Pittsburgh On Jul 15, 2009, at 12:16 PM, pianotech-request at ptg.org wrote: > From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] > On Behalf Of Noah Frere > Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 9:07 AM > To: pianotech at ptg.org > Subject: [pianotech] bass or plainsteel strings? > > > Hello all, > this may be something that can only be done at the piano. The > Currier Studio is missing F3 and F#3, and since that's at or very > near the break I don't know whether to install steel or copperwound > universal strings. The client has informed me that they are in the > treble section and that the string to the right is steel, but that > the string to the left is copper. The appointment is at 1 today. If > the broken strings are not in the piano I guess I can call Schaff > with the Serial # and perhaps they can tell me. Any thoughts? - > Noah > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090715/8d544e48/attachment.htm>
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