Anthony Hind wrote: > The person I quoted realised they had made a mistake, but my question > coming from that was, does length play any role in the breaking point > of a string, or is it simply tension, thickness and the material it is > made from? > > Again the answer is probably obvious and a basic physics textbook > answer is no doubt to hand. Unfortunately, I don't have access to one. > > I am happy there are so many people replying that are using gut > strings. I certainly hope to be able to use gut on a future Baroque > lute. > My fear however, is that indeed the top strings become even more > fragile on a Baroque lute than on my 60 cms Renaissance lute.
I don't think length per se makes a string more fragile, at least not at the lengths we're talking about here. I've still got the original 167cm extension strings on my theorbo; they sound fine after 15 years. The instrument doesn't get heavy use, and I note in passing that I've never seen a suspension bridge held up by gut cables. But all other things being equal, a longer string is going to be thinner. The strings of an A third course at 70 cm will tend to be about 85% the diameter of third-course strings at the same pitch on a 60 cm lute. This will tend to make them more fragile. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
