My early struggles with making wound strings didn’t entail them breaking so much as it did having the winding wire pop loose-ish just as I finished the winding. This is caused by the two driving ends of the core wire not being exactly in sync, and having the core get twisted. It sounds as though you have that aspect sorted out, though.

There are a lot of complicated ways of calculating the critical choices for any given note of core wire diameter, winding wire diameter, and the pitch of the winding wire’s “coil,” which can be expressed in two ways: the space between adjacent turns or the angle at which the winding wire addresses the core.

Some will find my way of thinking about this complicated, but I think it’s intuitively simpler than calculating final tensions. The short version is that I feel that since a plain string in the givien situation has too short a scale to sound good, then we must find a way to “lengthen” that scale. Imagine a string of a length that will sound good, at , to pick some arbitrary pitch, low A (bass clef), but sounds bad if slackened down to C. I envision adding winding wire as tuning the string to the tension of A, but having the mass of the attached winding wire slow the string down to sound C. This approach allows me to calculate how much winding wire (ie what diameter and what pitch) will make a string tuned up to “think” it’s playing A, actually sound C.

Enough of that, but that’s how I calculate my choices. One quickly discovers that a number of different combinations of winding wire parameters will give the same tension/stress/scale on the core wire. A thinner bit of winding wire at a tighter winding pitch, or a thicker one at a more open pitch.

Anyway, if you are making good choices for the final stress of the core wire, and not twisting it horribly by having the two ends of it on the winding machine get out of sync with each other, I’m not entirely sure what could be breaking your strings. The above situation is more likely, as I say, to make the winding wire fail to grip adequately, and pop loose, but if this were happening, you’d see it occur before you even removed the wire from the machine, AND the string wouldn’t actually sound at all, let alone pretty good, as you have reported. And pulling too hard on the winding wire I would think would result in breaking THAT, which, of course, I have done many times.

In any event, I can post pictures of how I feed my winding wire, and how I maintain a winding pitch that is reasonably close to my theoretically-chosen one.

I have used Instrument Workshop yellow brass as cores succerssfully. For winding wire, I use tin-plated pure copper wire sold in a local electronics store as “computer buss wire.” I could, if I wished, also get soft pure copper wire, from the Malin company, from a Portland, Oregon old-fashioned hardware store, in many more choices of diameter (sold on the Browne and Sharpe gauge system).

Our HPSCHD_L has a sibling Facebook group for members, which allows our members to post and view photos and the like. Phillip, if you have a Facebook account, someone here will tell you how to access that, where I will post some pictures of my setup.

owen

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