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Harpsichords and Related Topics

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From:
Owen Daly Harpsichords <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Harpsichords and Related Topics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 3 Jun 2017 07:29:15 -0700
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I have been making very successful and consistent tuning pins from Big Box Store nails for quite a few years now.  A member writes:

I have seen the dimension variation in 16 penny nails that David commented
on. The first test pin I made with an old stray nail in my hardware trays
was 4.05mm while the purchased box of nails averaged 3.45mm. I haven’t
tested whether they are ovals. But how did they ever create tuning pegs
when steel and brass rods were hand-drawn?


I would say that picking up the nails from hardware trays is a good way to get that inconsistency. Ever buy wood screws from bins? 

I make my pins from 16d bright commons, whose nominal “official” diameter is .162” (4.1mm). Smaller ones come from 10d bright commons, which are nominally .148” (3.8mm). In principle what you have is somebody dumping 10d nails into the 16d bin.

The consistency of diameter, from a working perspective, of the nails in 5lb boxes I purchase has been very good, and I don’t remember, in the course of making thousands of pins, any that suddenly fit any less well than any of their peers. It is true that I buy boxes, sometimes from the Home Depot brand, and sometimes the Ace Hardware brand, and sometimes Lowe’s, but I never, EVER mix them.

As for flats and out of round: these are commonly found on historical tuning pins, and on a set of antique pins I have in my temporary possession right now, there are flats which were clearly imposed intentionally. A colleague creates them on HIS 16d tuning pins with a quick swipe of a draw-file. I sometimes just give an axial swipe on a belt sander which is otherwise deployed to soften the heads and any burrs on the heads of the pins.

With a bit of slight out-of-perfect-roundness, and with some flats here and there, the pins hold better, and still turn as smooth as silk.

I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and do it because my pins turn more nicely than any store-bought pins I’ve gotten, and because this allows me to make decisions on the fly about such things as length, something that can become critical when you’re dealing with pins up close to a very tall nut, as in, for example, the bass end of a French harpsichord.

I just checked my chart of “official” nominal sizes for nails, and what this member purchased was NOT 16d commons. He purchased 16d BOX. It pays to be aware of the different meanings of penny sizes for different types of nails.

The chart here: http://www.mcvicker.com/offtech/smnail.htm <http://www.mcvicker.com/offtech/smnail.htm>

owen

(16d COMMONS, drill is a #22 Fuller brad-point, which won’t be found at a cheap hardware outlet.)

And finally: Asking how they ever created tuning pins with hand-drawn rod, which might be slightly out-of-round, is evidence of making simple, often unfounded, assumptions. The old tuning pins I’ve encountered work beautifully. And they are not perfectly round.



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