> Do you who use gut trim > it, leave it, or wind most of it on the pegs to keep things neater?
Dont wind on the peg, minimize the windings to enough to hold well. Loose winding dont look much better than dangling hanks (which is what you should do initially). To many risks wedging up against the pegbox side, impeding tuning and maybe even splitting the pegbox. I leave the excess alone initially, until I am sure the string is stretched in and gripped well at bridge and peg. Wind it up about a piece of cardstock and let it dangle (yes, ugly). When any string breaks, as gut will do, it does so at the nut or at the knot on the bridge - two points of strain. A break at the nut leaves you with two pieces, each too short to use for a string. Breaks at the bridge will leave you with a long enough piece that you could restring it, but, you may not want to because part will be stretched, part will have wear from frets, and there will be kinks from the peg and the nut. When using gut for strings, it is thought best to use gt for frets, and a variety of diameters is useful for grading those frets, so save the trimmed bits, and also used strings for freting. Good idea to use a bit of shirt cardboard or the like and wind the saved gut on it, noting the diameter; you could measure it later, using a dial caliper (careful not to squash if using a micrometer). -- Dana Emery To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
