iron wound strings

[John Delacour]

At 8:32 am -0700 23/4/07, Chris Strube wrote:

>...some previous technician  replaced the last bi-chord before the 
>tenor break with copper wound of a much lighter scale.  The note 
>sounds horrible, and can't be tuned.  My problem is to find the 
>right string weight in copper to come close to the original scale, 
>which was all done in iron wound.

At that point in the scale most of the string is steel anyway, so the 
difference between the iron cover and the copper cover will be only 
slight.  An exact calculation can easily be done, and should be 
really, but you would probably be very near the mark if you have a 
string made on the same gauge of steel with a copper covering that 
will give an overall diameter 0.25mm less than the string below, 
which allows a margin also for the possibility that the original 
strings broke owing to excessive tension in the design.

JD