<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi folks Had to respond to a couple things in the back and forth between Fred and Ron. First... strikes me that most of the discussion about what constitutes "significant" in terms of metal creep is because Fred and Ron are talking past each other. Ron speaks from an engineering perspective... what formulas tell us etc etc.  Where as Fred is comming directly from the perspective of what happens to metal piano wire. And I agree with Fred here... the <<significance>> factor of metal wire in the two perspectives can very easily be two very different things. To put it this way... are the engineers who design suspension bridges going to take the kind of elongation it takes to cause a 50 cent change in pitch in the piano wire application of steel cable as significant for their purposes ?.... an open question that I think Fred is correct in raising and has not been directly addressed in reply yet as far as I can see. As to the below bit... I would say to Ron, that while I agree entirely with him on this issue of soundboard vertical rise and fall... (for that matter I'd go further and discount bridge dimension in the vertical direction changes as unlikely too... due to the amount of increased down bearing even a 1 mm change causes... this despite the interesting point of the length change of the string segment on the surface such a rise would result in because of the bridge pin angles.)  ,,, In anycase... this is not something that is <<determined>> conclusively.  There are just those of us who think along these lines and have presented some fairly weighty evidence to support the view. But when this discussion last came up there were many who disagreed and stated outright that vertical rise and fall of the soundboard does indeed significantly effect pitch.  Cheers RicB <blockquote> <blockquote>>I do know that new strings drop in pitch over time on old > instruments with zero to negative bearing, in my experience (meaning wood > crushing probably wasn't a significant factor there). </blockquote> Wait a minute. We did this already. Why would wood crushing not be a factor with negative bearing? Hasn't it already been determined fairly reasonably that soundboard rise, or fall, isn't a significant (there's that word again - not absolute or exclusive, even if measurable) factor in pitch change? Isn't there still lateral pressure on bridge pins? Isn't there still longitudinal pressure on tuning pins? Haven't we all seen bridge pins that had been pushed back by string pressure enough to produce a visible gap between the pin and the side of the hole? Haven't we all seen in removed pinblocks how deeply indented the block is where the edge of the plate flange sat, and how detailed an impression of the plate irregularities is pressed into the surface? Haven't we seen tuning pins (lots of them) that had a very noticeable gap behind them where string tension through the years pulled them toward the hitch pins? How is that not wood crush, and how could that not be a very *major* factor in long term pitch drop? Be a skeptic, by all means, but hopefully with an eye toward accumulating better data, rather than discounting obvious evidence that doesn't fit the preconception. Just an observation of evidence needing processing. Ron N</blockquote> </body> </html>