Jerry,
Then again, I just opened my pill box and discovered I didn't take my medication yesterday. It is Thursday, isn't it? I can feel my heart hardening as we speak.

Hi rxd,

What's to disagree with? I hate unnecessary repairs too. This particular player works at my college. "This person" is one of those, shall we say, "string breakers?" I can replace "a wire" file the Vbar, hammer, voice it, regulate the let-off, whatever, it doesn't seem to matter. They are kind of like a drum player who breaks drum sticks at will. Whamo, another one breaks or even the same one.

If I had my way, I'd replace the wire from about F-5 roughly, (I forget off hand where that first break from tenor to treble is on that piano) to C-8 completely and file the pressure bar at the same time to eliminate any string grooves. While it would probably help, it wouldn't eliminate the string breakage. Not from this person.

The problem too is that It's like pulling teeth sometimes to get them to fork over the bucks to do that sort of work. It happens infrequently but yet not frequently enough for them to see fit to dole out the cash for the whole job instead of doing it piecemeal costing more in the long haul. So goes life.

Pills? What missing a lil cough, ole, cough, pill gonna do to you? Cough?

Remember: When you are tuning a piano and a string breaks, don't tell the customer, "I broke a string". Instead say, "a string broke on me".

You can even say, "There's a bad string on you piano that needs to be replaced"

But when you tune, you feel the strings are prone to break (most of the time) and when a strings does not stay in tune, the whole region can be replaced generally (2 sections in treble : 1 day's work).

If in the basses, the whole basses are prone to replacement, on a well scaled piano.

SO you can say it to the customer before then, often.

In schools, keeping the regulation and voicing in shape is supposedly enough to avoid string's breakage and brutal "pianists" may be pointed for the harm they do to instruments, not only at the strings.

The tuner may know what is voicing maintenance, however, which is certainly not the case before a certain number of years

Never felt ashamed to break a string unless it was the wrong pin (and it was decades from now !)

I'm sorry for the diversion, but I simply cannot read that subject line without my mind jumping instantly to this impromptu by the late, great, and sorely missed Steve Goodman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBrF-33GXW4

When а string will burst
keep of your eyes off it's

Gary, for one thing this thread is four months old and was about a pianist, not a technician, who broke a string.

For another thing, I feel like these kind of statements are somewhat misleading and even counter-productive, particularly on a public forum. While I understand what you mean - that breaking a string is not a technician's fault (at least it shouldn't be, if we're doing our job right!), there's nothing wrong with being completely honest and up-front with customers. I have broken strings before while tuning, and been completely honest with customers about it. I don't accept responsibility for it if it's not my fault - I simply explain why it happened and leave replacement choice and cost up to them. I tune a lot of very old and under-maintained pianos, so I've had this happen plenty of times.

Don't get me wrong - there's certainly nothing wrong with saying "a string broke on me." But your post comes across, especially to non-technicians (many of whom read this forum) as advice to misinform the customer. Particularly your second post (although I realize it is accurate, strictly speaking).

I had read the first few posts, not realising it was an old thread when I read the one from Jerry. It stopped me in my tracks for a moment but when I recovered I remembered Jerry.

Miss you. Jerry.