At 10:42 -0400 3/4/08, AlliedPianoCraft wrote: >John, you left out the part of the photo that I would like to see. >How do you hold the other end of the winding? I don't make that kind >of loop, but I would like to see how it's done. Yes, but we stringmakers like to keep a few things to ourselves, especially if we have developed special methods. Traditionally in England the eye-maker has a pair of smooth-jawed pliers, in one jaw of which is drilled a hole. An inch or so of wire is fed into the hole, the wire looped round the hook and back between the jaws of the pliers. The eye-maker then pulls like mad and squeezes like mad with one hand and turns the hook with the other until the spiral is right. He then releases the pressure slightly on the pliers and the wire is drawn up through the hole to form the finishing coils. In the English factories it was a specialist job and the stringmaker generally could not do it. One factory, now defunct, had a deaf and dumb man who did nothing all day but make eyes. It was a pretty Dickensian set-up. I visited them in their latter years and, standing along one wall was a huge machine about 15 feet long that they had bought for $20,000 (say $100,000 today) to make eyes. They had never managed to get it to work satisfactorily and the deaf and dumb man was still madly turning out the eyes. I do it differently. JD
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