Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum I messed up the strings by cleaning. Any solution?

Twisting the bass strings is only temporary.

One cannot know exactly what happens when bass strings get wet. Sometimes only a portion gets wet, not at the ends, and the results are unpredictable. Sometimes the strings go dead, sometimes not. There is more to winding a bass string than just swaging the ends.

Twisting a bass string that has a rattle often takes out the rattle but not always. Twisting a dead one only improves it slightly and probably not permanently. I have heard of such things as taking the strings off and washing them in gasoline but if you go to that much trouble, you would be better off replacing them. I have never done such a thing but I can hardly imagine it would bring life back to a dead string.

I only recommend polishing and twisting (1 turn) bass strings that still sound fairly good on a cheap, old piano. It only takes about an hour and will improve the sound on a piano that is otherwise not worth restringing. That is where that kind of procedure has some value. It removes built up corrosion and dust and therefore improves the sound. If the strings are very tubby or rattly, the improvement would be marginal at best so it would be a better decision to replace them.

In the case of my own piano, I did not want to do a lot of work that would ultimately not yield the results I was looking for so I bought a new set of wound strings for it and put them on. That was enough work. It took an entire day but there are probably people who could do it faster like in a half day or even as little as two hours. But a job done in two hours with sloppy coils is not a job worth paying for. For the job to be worth what you pay, it has to look like it was never done. It has to look like the original factory work or it won't stay in tune and it devalues the piano severely.

Bill:

We have the same model of piano. I had been wondering why you changed your bass strings, what manufacturer you used, and if there was a change from the original design.

Back in my bold and impetuous youth I cleaned the bass strings on a brand new Steinway L with Tarnex. It worked like a charm and instantly made the discolored bass strings look bright and better than new. It also instantly rendered them dull and toneless. The only "solution" was a new set of bass strings. Ouch!

In the case of the Tarnex I suspect it was some chemical molecular thing with the tightly wound copper.

I got an engineer friend of mine to model a bass string off of some measurements I gave him and use an FEA (Finite Element Analysis)program called Abacus to see the effects that various liquids have on it while vibrating.

We came to the conclusion that if the gaps and voids on the inside of the string were filled completely with eg. oil, it had little effect. Two reasons, oil has a fraction of the specific density of steel or copper and the voids were incredibly small in volume compared to the same cross section of string and wrap.

It had little effect in dampening other than the overall mass increasing slightly. Bear in mind that the cad rendering was arcs contacting arcs and did not decrease this void area as a real copper wrap would by deforming slightly on the core. Now if small amounts of dirt or dust became clumped and freely bounced around in the internal voids of the wrap, the dampening increased a bit comparatively.

The worse case scenario for dampening that we could create was when a liquid such as oil was placed intermittently across a length of string. The string vibration caused the liquid to flow to the modal areas of the string segments and away from the nodes. This to me, would indicate that upper partials would be greatly reduced in both frequency and amplitude in a random way.

If the segments stop vibrating at their preferred harmonics the whole partial ladder goes out of whack and (I am now hypothesizing), the tone would sound more dead because of a lack of supporting upper harmonics.

FEA is not perfect but can usually show fundamental properties working realistically enough to give ideas for possible solutions. I'm thinking maybe a solution that spreads equally throughout the winding to eliminate random accumulation here and there would work at bringing back the tone somewhat? It would obviously have to be something other than oil. If the string is shot, it might be worth a try as an experiment before replacing with a new one.

Emmery, I hate to say this but your one, very long paragraph is virtually unreadable. I am sure you have something valuable to contribute but you might try breaking it up a bit.

I edited it and put in some spaces for the paragraphically challenged. (Just kidding)
I posted this because I know there are some people who would be inclined to hear a hypothesis out on a limb rather than a blanket dead end statement without an explanation behind it.

I remember a PTG Journal article from 1976 or 1977. A Japanese brand of grand piano (I am pretty sure Kawaii) had a model where a certain wound string would become dead. Investigation discovered that an assembler was using paraffin to keep a screw on a screwdriver. Some of the paraffin would get onto the wound string and later the tone would turn dead. The recommended repair was to remove the string, wash it in kerosene, let it dry, and reinstall it. I guess there is a time and place for every repair.

Emmery
Do you know if your friend published anything about it? or can he share the modeling he has done? What you described is extremely difficult to model in Abaqus and I'm wondering how he tackled many major obstacles (multiscale, mutiphysics, contact, material properties, etc) for the solution to be a good approximation.
Regards,
Krikorik

Thanks for editing your post, Emmery but I'm afraid I still don't know much more than I did before, that virtually any liquid that gets on a wound string is apt to ruin it. That's why I doubt a proposed remedy that involves yet another liquid.

Jeff, I replaced the wound strings on my piano because over about a 2 year period that started after the piano was out of warranty, they almost all went tubby. The lower ones worse than the upper ones. I do not know what caused it but I didn't try any remedy. I ordered a new set from the manufacturer. They only cost $250 but it also cost me a day's earnings.

In this case, I handled the job as I would have a single replacement since the piano was only 13 years old and was perfectly clean and in perfect order in every other respect. I took one string off, backing the pin out 1 1/2 turns, made a new coil on a dummy pin, put the coil on the old pin, and dressed the coil as I put tension on it. I did that for each string. It was very tedious to say the least but it was the way I had decided was best in this instance. It probably is not what should be done in the case of the subject of this thread.

Just for information, I installed each string with a 1/2 twist on the loop. I initially tuned each string to +20 cents upon installation. By the time I had finished installing all of the strings, they had all (except the very lowest which I had installed last) gone flat by about 20 cents (a 40 cent drop in pitch). At the end of that long job, I tuned all strings again to +10 cents. By the next morning, they were all fairly in tune with the rest of the piano but in a few days they were flat again. Several times, I re-tuned the strings to +10 cents until they finally began to stay in tune for a while. I did that job last February and now they are staying in tune normally as they have been for the last few months.

There is only one possibility I could think of as to why the strings went dead but I still wonder why it took over 10 years to happen. The piano is equipped with a Piano Disc system which I really like and use to record accompaniments for my vocal studies. I hire a pianist to record the accompaniment once and then I can play that accompaniment again as many times and as often as I want for study. It also has a Dampp-Chaser system that I really would not do without. The player system leaves very little room for the humidifier. I am thinking that because the humidifier is so close to the bottom end of the wound strings, that moisture from it slowly ruined the strings. So, when I finished the restringing, I placed some material between the humidifier and the strings to act as a barrier.

Incidentally, I would say that there had been a dealer here (now out of business) who actively discouraged piano owners from having D-C systems installed in their pianos, ESPECIALLY Disklavier or pianos with another brand of electronic player system. They WARNED people that the moisture would DESTROY the electronics but in the 13 years I have owned the piano, that has not happened.

There was a case that I saw where movers had failed to empty the humidifier of a studio piano before moving it. Water from the humidifier spilled on some of the lower wound strings and made them rattle and go tubby at the same time. Twisting them even 2 or 3 turns did not help. I can't see that putting more liquid on them would have either since the only contamination on them was just water. Those strings had to be replaced.

I cannot know really whether moisture from the D-C humidifier was was the cause or not but what I do know is that D-C humidifiers have always had a moisture distribution shield to prevent moisture from flowing in just one direction. Mine has one, of course but I can also imagine that it may have caused a high amount of moisture to be present in the area of the bottom 1/4 of the wound strings. This has made me be careful to install humidifiers in vertical pianos over to the right as far as possible to avoid that situation. If I must install the humidifier directly in front of wound strings, I place a piece of plastic material between the humidifier and the wound strings to direct moisture flow away from them.

Krikorik, I will PM you details, since I don't want to detour the thread in a direction few readers would be interested in following. Several different programs were used because of some difficulties encountered along the way. Some experimenting with actual strings would be the next logical step since I am still sitting with a hypothesis.

I have heard that bass players will remove their strings and boil them. Then they replace them and it really livens up dead strings. I have no idea if this would work, but it may be worth a shot. Maybe you could try it with one or two strings first and, if they come back, you could do all the bass strings. Reinstalling the freshly boiled strings would save a considerable amount of money. Again, I'm not sure about this, but it seems that it would be worth at least a try. Of course make sure that they are very very well dried before reinstallation. Also, since I'm not a piano technician, I don't know the ramifications of trying to reinstall the same string. I'm just throwing this out there.

Bill:

Thanks for the reply. My bass strings still have plenty of life, but I wonder if there could be a scaling improvement. My DC is on the right side. I will try to avoid left hand installations.

Indeed, I played with some bass players who did so very successfully. A few years ago that topic came up on the PTG mailing list. I remember that an Australian collegue tested it with piano strings and it worked.

Gregor

I'll bet that when BDB sees this post, his eyes will roll to the back of his head!

There are lots of things that can do something to make old bass strings sound a little better for a short time. Usually that just means making them louder at the cost of quality of tone. If it does not last for more than a year, chances are it will be cheaper to replace the strings instead.

My duet partner is married to one of the world's great bass technicians. I could ask him about boiling bass strings. The sort of bass players I tune for can afford to replace their strings when they need to, though. The show I am tuning for tonight is a bassist.

Oh, I forgot to mention: some bass players use Kukident ( the USA pendant is called Fixodent I think), which is a pellet that produces sparkling when put into water. But that´s the luxury version. Boiling is just cheaper.

Gregor

I was called to a Church one time that had a Day Care. They told me some kid had spilt Kool-Aid on the piano and now half of the bass strings were dead. I used Arledge bass strings to replace the whole set. The question I have is there anything I could have done to restore the bad strings. It was mostly sugar and water that ruined them and not anything that had oil it it. I was once told boiling the strings in water could have cleaned them up but I've never tried that myself.

I have trouble buying that you could actually simulate a string in this or even something like a full cosmos model for failure. Lots of variables and no real relation any real measurement of "tone", which is what we are really talking about here.

I will buy that taking a sting and letting it sit in solvent might fix the problem. I know that a few bass players who boil their strings to clean them, then soak them in something highly volatile and let dry in moving air.

Short of just leaving them be is there a correct way to clean strings on a old piano, specifically say just around where the hammers hit so that you keep everything clean.

EDIT
here is the link to the bass strings
http://www.tunemybass.com/string/how_to_clean_bass_strings.html

100% wood spirts so no water no oil.

I have had very good results in bringing back some tone in old bass strings by lowering the pitch on each one about an octave and playing loudly a number of times and then bringing the pitch back up (plus another 20 cents or so temporarily while tuning the rest of the piano). The pitch will drop some, and the bass should be retuned a week later. This is a particularly good technique for old pianos that have a few notes that are much worse than the others.

(The octaves sound kind of neat. I have thought about tuning a piano this way on purpose, just to see... Hmmm, I have a likely suspect in mind, too. There is a Vose spinet that I will probably take off of someone's hands just because it has a dampchaser... I could tune the treble strings this way too if I take my time and choose the correct strings...)