Piano Music Wire - Types, Sizes and Uses - YouTube

Welcome and thanks for joining us for our next video here at Howard Piano

Industries. Today we're going to be showing you in this video about

piano wire. We sell it in a number of different ways and a couple different

manufacturers, So you can buy it in 10-foot lengths or whole large coils of it.

So we're going to show you some different things and maybe teach you

some things about piano wire you may not have known before, but piano wire is

also known as music wire. Piano wire is a specialized type of wire

made for use in piano strings. It's made from tempered high carbon steel

also known as spring steel and so it's got a high tensile strength which is made

so that the extreme tension that a piano string is under when it's in the piano

will make it so it doesn't break. When you look at a piano and the strings

in a piano you may notice that most of the treble strings, the ones that

aren't on the bottom bass section that have copper winding on them but the

rest of them that are just plain steel wire all look fairly consistent in size

but actually, there's usually about 10 to 12 different sizes of wires. Some use a

little bit less or more depending on the model of piano but there's usually quite

a few different sizes ranging anywhere from what we would call a size 12 up to

size 21. Somewhere in that range of wire. So there is varying sizes of wire

in a piano. Up at the top end they're going to use the smallest wire and then as

it moves down or lower in range, that's going to be a little bit thicker wire.

Now we've got, we sell piano wire or music wire ranging all the way from

.009000ths of an inch all the way up to .047000ths of an inch.

Here we've got something that shows

Here we've got something that shows

we've got the .009. As you can see, that's very thin

size piano wire and would never be used in a piano but they use it

size piano wire and would never be used in a piano but they use it

piano wire scale and that is just a little bit smaller than the smallest wire

that would generally be used in a piano. Here we have a size 18 or 41,000ths

of an inch and then the largest that we generally carry is

.047 which is a size 21. We do have larger sizes available

at times but those are the, most of the sizes and you can see

like say, from a size 18 to size 21, there's not a big difference but it's

6,000ths of an inch difference in diameters, so it's not a huge difference

and again even going down to .026 there's

a noticeable difference, but again, not a huge difference. So those are some

examples of different size wire. So when you are replacing a piano string you

want to make sure you measure and are replacing the wire with the correct size

to the nearest thousandths of an inch. Now the different ways that we offer our

piano wire, this is a 10 foot coil length of wire. In most cases that

will be enough wire to replace at least one string in a piano. This one is size

18 that we have. We also sell it in larger coils like this. This is a one

pound coil of size 12 wire and these are the 10-foot lengths and these one-pound

coils, that we sell are made by Roslau in Germany. So that's

how we have those. As you get into the smaller sizes of the

Roslau larger coils they're quarter pound and a half pound just depending on

what size, because you get a lot more feet per pound. So you get smaller

coils, at least weight-wise. This is also Roslau.

This is a third pound coil on a real. The Roslau, it's just a plain coil.

It comes with his brace, but this third pound coil comes with a real

and it's sometimes a little bit easier to handle the wire. This is a brake

that's available also, separately. For the third pound coils you can

insert the wire through the hole and then tighten that up and that'll keep it

from taking off on you. You can also just put the wire through the hole at the end

if you don't want to use the brake or get the brake with it. So those are

the Roslau options. The other way we have piano wire available is

this piano wire assortment. These have 13 different size wires which are

the common sizes used in a piano and we've got some size 13 up to size 21

and of course, the smaller sizes, there's less feet. In the size 21 and size 20 we

have 17 of feet of wire in this assortment. Size 13 and 13 1/2

which has three feet each because as you've got the higher notes, where these

size wires would normally be used, they're much shorter strings, so these

are handy if you're going to replace, and to have replacements for an individual

piano string. If you want to have on hand you can order that assortment. Now the

other brand of wire that we sell, oh, one other thing, with these one pound and

quarter pound and half pound coils, I usually recommend using a piano wire

canister. We've got another video that shows how to put the wire into the

canister, but it's just an easy way to dispense the the wire and you can put it

in there and then pull out as much wire as you need and holds it a good way to

dispense that. The other brand of wire that we carry is Mapes.

This is the Mapes wire. We don't sell it in piano wire sizes.

We have everything from actually .008

up to size 11 and 2/3, I think it's about .028, I think is

the largest size we have. So that comes in a coil that, it's either

half pound or a quarter pound coil, depending on which size you get.

The smaller sizes of course are quarter pound coils, but we have that and that's

mostly used for other types of instruments such as dulcimers

harpsichords, harps, and a whole slew of different musical instruments that use

that smaller size wire that we have available. Now piano wire is also used

for a number of different purposes. We sell a lot of piano wire to people

to use for things such as cutting soap, cutting cheese. We've had people buy it

for cutting the seal on a broken windshield, cutting a

mirror off of, that's been glued to a wall. A lot of people buy

it for making springs of different sizes, fishing lures. So those are some

different things that they can be used for besides just musical instruments

such as pianos and and so forth. But we have all of these things available on

our website at howardpianoindustries.com and feel free to contact us with

any questions and make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel to be

updated of any new videos that we come out with.