The whole process of stringing and inserting tangents is fairly involved, so I'm going to divide this into three parts.
I had a small problem with the pin block holes being too small and, in many cases, not deep enough. I had been on a bit of a hiatus (moving, moving out of state, selling a house, buying a house, you know the drill) and didn't take notes on what I did/thought or didn't do/think with that pin block, so I decided I just needed to go over all of the holes again with my #30 drill bit, take out all the keys, vacuum out the case, and then forge ahead. Done.
The top ten tangents strike extremely thin strings. The tangents' thickness is needed on the mid and low strings to produce a pleasing sound, but it's too much for the uppermost fine strings and must be thinned by half. To accomplish this, my husband (turned clavichord sous chef) used F. Dick's No.2 diamond file that I had in my silversmithing supplies (another hobby of mine which distracts me from time to time). After four to six passes on each side of the tangent, thickness was checked and additional passes made until the desired result was achieved.
While my husband worked on thinning tangents, I worked on installing a couple of strings so we could insert those tangents in their corresponding keys. It's not advisable to string the whole instrument and then try to go back and put the tangents in the keys. The reason for this is that there's a lot of removing and replacing a key as you work on it, and all those strings would get in the way. While I'm told it can be done, it makes an already tricky job more difficult. So we are inserting the tangents as we go and therefore working from the highest pitches down to the lowest.
The first step is to make a nice loop that will catch on a hitch pin and not unravel under pressure. The coil of string needs to be clamped so that you can pull on the string and form the loop. Here's my fancy setup off a closet shelf. I've protected the coil with quilt batting and sandwiched it all between two paint sticks. A big C-clamp (which might actually be a leftover from my harpsichord-building days many moons ago) holds it all together.
About an inch from the end of the string, an angle of what I'll call a narrow 90-degrees is formed by gently bending the wire on a cup hook that has been inserted in a dowel. The hook needs to dissect that angle formed by the wire so that as the dowel is turned, a helix is formed. Sorry the pic is blurry.
I made enough turns to produce about 3/4" of twists. At that point, I turned the short end of the wire perpendicular to the helices and make about five turns to finish off the loop. These last turns are not forming helices, but cause the short end of the wire to wrap around the long wire to make a pretty finish and secure the helices. I'll probably go back and trim the ends a little, but for now, this will do.
A note on the dowel with cup hook: I used a fairly thick dowel because this tool does double duty. One end has the cup hook, but the other end is drilled with a #30 hole to insert a tuning pin. There will be pix later on in Part 2. This setup facilitates winding the string. The skinny little dowel which was included in the kit was barely larger around than a #30 hole and promptly split when I drilled it. So I used a fatter dowel that I had purchased for another project and am quite happy with it.
My next installment will explain how I wound the strings around the tuning pins. Later...
