Two broken bass strings in one tuning?????

[Ron Nossaman]

> What's up with this? I was tuning a Baldwin console tonight and two bass 
> strings broke!!! F2 (one of the unisons) and G1. I can't figure out why 
> they broke. There was no visible rust on the strings. I barely raised 
> the pitch when they broke. When the second broke, I decided to stop 
> tuning. I didn't have enough time to attempt a splice on the strings, so 
> I'm going to go back tomorrow.

I ran into this a week ago, when the very first string popped 
before it got anywhere near pitch. No obvious reason, so I 
logged it as a suicide, talked it over with the owner, 
replaced the string, discussed the odds of twenty three more 
breaking, charged them a service call, and bailed with their 
agreement. They needed a real piano anyway (rather than one 
abandoned in the house they bought), so it wasn't that much of 
a stretch


> Any suggestions? Any ideas as to a cause? I was hoping to look up the SN 
> in my Pierce Piano Atlas, didn't see it. It's 809893, but the atlas 
> didn't list any SN close to that, so I wonder if I copied it wrong. I 
> wish I had asked the owner how old the piano is.
> 
> Thanks. Sam.

You may or may not ever know. Murphy was a blithering 
optimist, and reality carries concealed weapons. It's a matter 
of whether or not the price of trying to find out is worth the 
price of -maybe- knowing, or maybe not. It's a crap shoot, 
with your customer's cash on the pass line while you try to 
read the dice. Conservative is better, in my opinion, as the 
potential cost begins to exceed the likely return.

Ron N