Where's the engineer? - was string seating - was bridge caps

Bill Ballard yardbird@vermontel.net
Sat, 14 Apr 2001 08:28:13 -0400


Pardon me for dozing in the back row through most of this excellent 
class and suddenly waking and not understanding what I have missed, 
but......

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001,"Mike and Jane Spalding" <mjbkspal@execpc.com> wrote:

>The question we'll try to answer is:  As the bridge swells with increasing
>moisture content, the top surface rises relative to the bridge pin.  Will
>the resistance of the wire to slide up the bridge pin be enough to
>permanently indent the top of the bridge cap?
>
>For small angles, the sideways force of the wire against the pin is
>approximately equal to the offset (.131) divided by the pin separation (.75)
>times the tension ( 160)., or 28#.  For small angles like this (10 degrees)
>the error is only a couple of percent.

Wouldn't the calculation of the sideways force need to include the 
speaking length? IWO, if you took a straight sting segment and 
applied a deflecting force 3/4" from the far end of the segment, 
wouldn't the deflecting force also be a function of how short a 
segment the front portion would be. Bear in mind I've got barely 
enough math to balance my checkbook, but when you deflect that 
original segment, don't you create two right triangles, sharing 
opposite sides, the sum of whose adjacent sides equals the original 
segment length, and the sum of whose hypotenuses equals the current 
length of the now deflected segment? And wouldn't the force required 
for the deflection be equivalent to the force required to overcome 
the elastic forces of the strings, in producing the equivalent 
elongation along the axis of that segment (instead of perpendicular 
to it)? And wouldn't the elongation have to include as an ingredient, 
not just the distance from the far end of the segment to the point of 
deflection (3/4"), but the distance to the near end, in our piano, 
the distance between bridge pins and the speaking length distance, 
respectively.

It seems to me much easier to make a .131" deflection in the middle 
of a segment than 3/4" from one end, and that ease increasing as the 
overall distance from aggraphe/capo to rear bridgepin grows.
If there's going to be a quiz on this, I'd like to know the right answer. <g>

Also, correct me again if I've fallen asleep at a critical moment, 
but isn't the calculation of the force of static friction between the 
bridgepin and string simply to tell us what force would be holding 
the two together should the bridgepin "heave" and the string have no 
compelling reason to do anything other than "stick with it" and 
follow it upwards? But at the very moment when the string follows the 
pin upwards, and a gap opens up underneath the string, wouldn't the 
string, experiencing the increasing elastic forces (of an increasing 
horizontal deflection, and the arrival of a vertical deflection) much 
prefer to reduce the increasing elastic forces of its own elongation, 
by simply sliding down the pin back onto the bridge cap?. Assuming as 
we have in this case a perfectly cylindrical bridgepin.

I agree with PR-J that bridgepins creep up out of their holes and 
need to be tapped down, and I agree with his experience that tapping 
drivepins is cures a far larger portion of false beats than tapping 
strings. Its has a;so been my experience that strings wander much 
more laterally, away from the pin than climbing upwards on the pin. I 
even went so far as to set up a dial indicator on individual strings 
of a heavily used rehearsal piano to look for downward motions of the 
strings. Didn't see any. Maybe somebody else should try this.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

"Garth, Take me!"
"Where? I'm low on gas and you need a jacket"
     ...........Kim Bassinger and Dana Carvey in "Wayne's World 2"
+++++++++++++++++++++



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