Stringing 3

Once all of the bridge pins are in place the instrument can be brought up to pitch - a process that takes several days to complete. Actually tuning the instrument only takes about 20 or 30 minutes but the strings are all new and stretch slightly during the process which means that, by the time you have finished, the first strings that you tuned will already have dropped in pitch by quite a significant amount and a day later the whole instrument will be about a semi-tone flat.

If you are just replacing a single string you can get it somewhere close to stable in 10 minutes or so by repeatedly bringing it back up to pitch but with a new instrument there is no point in trying to do that - all of the hitchpin loops and the coils on the tuning pins are settling in and the whole instrument is adjusting to being under tension so you might as well just start tuning and checking things once a day for the next few days until the instrument settles down.

As it happens I was kept quite busy because I has to replace quite a few strings during the process. There were one or two hitchpin loops that obviously weren't quite as good as I thought they were because they slipped and the strings would not stay up to pitch so obviously they had to be replaced. I also broke quite a few strings, almost all of which were in the octave below middle c. They all broke at the hitchpin loop just at the end of the double helix where the wire is twisted together. After some investigation I came to the conclusion that I had been twisting the wire just a little bit too tightly when making the hitchpin loops and that this was the cause of the problem. The wire on this instrument ranges from 0.022" in the bass to 0.009" in the treble. The strings that broke were all about 0.012" - it seems that the thinner wire could survive being twisted quite tightly and that the thicker wire was just a bit stronger but the 0.012" just didn't like the way that I had been treating it. I had to replace about 15 strings but all of the replacements held OK.