Owen,

16d Box vs Common....after >45 years of pounding nails into wood I never
realized the difference.  I just went down to the shop and clear as a bell
in English & Spanish the box of nails says 16d "Box" nails.  Thanks very
much for the heads up.  For clavichord #2 I will read the writing on the
box of nails I buy next time with care!

As far as my comment about old time tuning pins from out "out-of-round"
hand drawn steel, that was my unclear sarcasm, sorry.  I have been a
hand-tool wood worker for long enough to know that some wonderful and
beautiful things were made without 1/1000th of an inch measurements ever
being taken.  Most things are built to fit not to an exact known number.  I
almost always cut a board a hair longer than then trim it back to fit using
my shooting board.  So whether it is 8.500" or 8.5002...who ever knows.
Nothing is ever exact.  Please don't think I was berating things of
yesterday.  I was actually mocking the relatively modern idea of numerical
measurement perfection.  Beauty is sometimes in the uniqueness of
imperfection!

regards,
Phil


On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 8:29 AM, Owen Daly Harpsichords <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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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Note:  opinions  expressed on HPSCHD-L are those of the  individual con-
tributors and not necessarily  those of the list owners  nor of the Uni-
versity of Iowa.  For a brief  summary of list  commands, send mail to
[log in to unmask]  saying  HELP .
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