I have been reading the discussion of piano wire and the treatment
thereof with considerable interest.  I know little about pianos, but
I have come to two conclusions:

1) The tuning -- or at least the tuning after restringing -- of a piano
belongs on Kinsler's List of Things That You'll Never Do Right, along
with the care of nickel-cadmium batteries, the sharpening of a knife,
the break-in of a new car's engine, and the salvation of the immortal
soul.

2) The discussion of the elasticity of piano wire is in agreement with
my own studies of materials.  Steel is among the best-behaved of
materials from the standpoint of elasticity.  The other components of
a piano, especially those made of wood, are far more likely to exhibit
non-linearities, especially after stress is released and then restored.

The discussion of the piano plate material is also of interest.  Cast
iron, cast steel, and the variants thereof have been revolutionized in
the extreme over the past fifty years, and I doubt that it's constructive
to compare whatever it was that plates were made of in the 1920's with
the nodular iron that's available now.  We make automobile crankshafts
from this stuff, so I rather doubt that a piano plate made of it would
be anything but predictable in behavior.  The wood parts, especially if
poorly mated to the plate as pointed out earlier, are another story
altogether.

Falseness in strings is, I believe, unrelated to their elasticity.  If
a string doesn't vibrate in its intended mode, the cause is likely to
be due to variations in the linear density of the string, i.e., the
string is thicker in some places than in others.  This happens often
in guitars and fiddles because the string is strummed or bowed in one
place and fingered in another.  I'm told by string players more skilled
than I that it doesn't take much wear to make some strings sound false,
at least to the discerning listener.

Mark Kinsler
Lancaster, Ohio USA
http://www.frognet.net/~kinsler

 [ Prof. Dan Russell of Kettering University, Flint, MI (formerly
 [ General Motors Institute), has placed some interesting technical
 [ papers at his web site, including "Nonlinear Behavior of Piano
 [ Hammers", "Sound Radiation from Tuning Forks" and "Baseball Bats --
 [ acoustical and vibrational behavior of wood and aluminum Little
 [ League baseball bats"!  Visit http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/
 [ -- Robbie