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Help--- I am looking for ideas to bail me out. I am tuning a Cambridge spinet which was a model made for Ivers & Pond. I did 2 pitch raises but an having fits trying to tune B2 and C2 which are wound bi-chords. Using an SAT III I can stop the lights on both notes but when played the 2 notes sound exactly alike. Would turning the windings on the strings help ?

E3 is the last wound string before the break. F3 is a plain steel trichord after the break.
The SAT III with note stepping turned on advances the note to F3 but the sound you hear is a large jump from E3. Even though all the wound strings from A0 to E3 stop the lights and sdvance correctly on the SAT they do not sound good when played and they sound awful when played with notes in the 4th and 5th octaves.
I checked the bass bridge for cracks and seperations but did not see any problem.
Would it be beneficial to twist all of the bass strings a full turn ? Any suggestions are welcome

Sometimes you just have to use your ears and your taste. When tuning a poor bass, there can be several beats that you hear simultaneously, and you can't tune them all out. What I aim for is that:

Octaves don't sound bad, nor do multiples of octaves, and they are recognizable as octaves.
Octaves plus fourths or fifths don't sound bad.
Thirds beat slower and slower as you go down the scale.
The same beats in adjacent notes sound similar.
The scale sounds chromatic, or at least like the pitch is increasing as you go up the scale and decreasing if you go down.

Voicing the bass notes, sometimes quite severely, can help straighten out wayward harmonics quite a bit. But you are into the "art" of piano tuning here, not just science.

Good Morning JIMBOB,

The little Cambridge spinets were indeed a "work of art." I have a couple of those I tune, and though not the worst they do rank somewhere near the bottom. I would give the bass strings some twist. That probably would not hurt, but I agree with BDB that you are going to have to rely on your ears to get this area of the little beast in tune. The SATIII is probably having a hard time hearing it because of the scale of this piano, and the condition of the bass strings.

Drop me a note.

Ron

If C3 is tuned just set the Sat on C4, play C3 and take a reading - adjust the lights till they stop. Then tune C2 - stop lights and listen to the octave. If it needs to be stretched a bit you can use the cents button to see how much then add an offset equal to that amount and that should be close enough for bass tuning.

Check the octave spread like scutch says but also check for a 6/3 octave by setting the SAT to G4 and checking C2-C3. Remember to set the sat to tune mode so it read the fundemental instead of the calculated tuning which reads the partial. The bass should be a wide 4/2 which would be a nice 6/3.

JIMBOB, try checking the Unisons of those strings B2, C3?,with the SAT in tune mode to eliminate any false partial reading caused by a bad string.

KR