Guitar Strings: Bronze Wound on Steel, Then Heat-Soaked (Stone and Falcone 1977)

A wound string is a steel core with another wire wrapped round it. Stone and Falcone believed the wrap keeps stresses from the winding and slowly unwinds as the string is played, so the tone goes dead. Their fix: after winding, heat-soak the string, at least 2 hours at 270 °F or 30 minutes at 480 °F for a bronze wrap, then let it cool. Source: W. N. Stone and A. S. Falcone (National Musical String Co.), US 4,063,674 (1977). Unknown: where phosphor bronze wire comes from, and the gauges. The winding, which the patent calls conventional, is ours, after Landtroop and Dykstra, US 6,256,872 (2001). These are linked to unknown heads. The plain strings of the set are steel music wire; that, the oven and the nitrogen are ours. Picture drawn by Youblob.