Dear Mike and All,
Piano wire is the usual nightmare when you investigate it thoroughly. In the
old days it was rarely measured using old units of length as the wire makers
preferred to use wire gauges - and there were several of these.
Some years ago I helped a friend design a piano and my research soon
revealed the following methods of measuring the thickness of a piece of
wire: American music wire gauge; British imperial wire gauge; Birmingham
Stubs steel wire gauge; Birmingham Stubs iron wire gauge; Brown and Sharpe
or American gauge; several European wire gauges; Japanese wire gauge;
Washburn and Meon steel wire gauge.
Probably the most commonly used in the USA is the American music wire gauge.
However with so many pianos made in Europe, Japan and Korea you can't
guarantee that American wire gauge is used even in the USA.
When we carried out our research (mid 1980s) we didn't find any supplier who
specified their wires in thousandths of an inch. It may be that the agent
your piano tuner is using is dumbing down gauges to fractional inches for
him. For readers who aren't familiar with gauges they are a strange way of
specifying wire (and sheet) thicknesses where the larger the gauge number
the thinner the wire, eg 12 gauge is thinner than 10 gauge.
My friend subsequently went into piano production in Australia, and on my
advice, he specifies the piano wires he needs in micrometres. In that way he
lets the supplier fiddle about inside his wire works with the old gauges and
the old units. If my friend orders wire from Japan or from the USA, he
simply orders (say) 600 micrometre wire - he doesn't need to know what is in
the mind of the supplier; he just checks it with his micrometer when it
arrives.
As a matter of interest my friend currently is making two piano models -
both of them in the form of grand pianos. He has in production a 2.9 metre
grand and he is currently developing a 2 metre 'baby' grand. His original
design was for a 3 metre grand but the stage openings of most theatres were
designed to comfortably accommodate 9 ft pianos - so 2.9 metres was as large
as he could reasonably go.
--
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
CAMS - Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
- United States Metric Association
ASM - Accredited Speaking Member
- National Speakers Association of Australia
Member, International Federation for Professional Speakers
on 2001/04/27 19.27, Michael D Payne at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I talked with a Piano tuner yesterday who told me piano wire was in
> thousands of an inch worldwide, he had German wire and it was as above.
> Anyone have any idea if Piano wire is metric outside the US? I find it
> hard to believe everyone else would work in inches.
>
> Mike Payne
