Manufacture and Use
General-purpose, high-carbon steel, drawn music wire (such as ASTM A228) is manufactured in both inch and metric music wire gauges (m.w.g.) in diameters as small as 0.006 inch up to 0.192 inch (0.15 to 4.8 mm). A small number of companies produce the tough, high tensile polished wire intended for limited music instrument markets, which is manufactured from steel of a specific composition by cold drawing.
Piano strings are among the most demanding of all applications of steel. Placed under high tension, they are subject to repeated blows, they are stretched and slackened during tuning and are still expected to last for decades. Similar challenges arise in plucked instruments, along with the additional demand of being bent when plucked.
Piano wire must also be extremely consistent in size: variations greater than 0.0003 inch (8 μm) will produce audible falseness in modern instruments.
Piano wire is sold by weight and packaged in tight coils. It springs back to a gentle curve but can be straightened using a series of opposed rollers. It requires careful handling for safety and appearance, since it can be marred by perspiration, and it requires special cutters, as the hardened steel will otherwise quickly dull the cutter.
Read more about this topic: Piano Wire
Famous quotes containing the words manufacture and and/or manufacture:
“I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traffic is not morally second.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this—that we manufacture everything there except men.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)