A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Wrestplank

by Alfred James Hipkins

WRESTPLANK^[1] and WRESTPINS. The Wrestplank or Pinblock of a pianoforte is the carrier of the wrest or tuning-pins, and is of great importance to the tone and stability of the instrument, its solidity maintaining the due continuance of the upper partials of the strings as it also contributes to the enduring resistance against their tension. In modern pianos it is built up of layers of wood with grain running alternately longitudinally and transversely; the woods employed being generally beech and wainscot. A brass plate which is to be often seen covering the wrestplank and is attractive to the eye, plays no real part in assuring the solidity of the structure. Broadwoods' metal pin-piece, a plate of iron ⅝ inch thick, through which the wrestpins screw into the wooden wrestplank beneath, is the surest means for keeping the pin in position without crushing the wood where the leverage of the string is exerted, or allowing the tuner the facile but unsound practice of rocking the pin from side to side. Becker of St. Petersburg exhibited at Paris, 1878, a grand piano wherein this part of the instrument was entirely of iron, and cast together with the frame. The bar was not bored for wrestpins, but was the bed for a system of mechanical tuning-pins, the principle of which is the female screw analogous to the machine heads used in guitars, etc. Becker has been followed by others, as was shown in the London Inventions Exhibition, 1885, where four more or less ingenious adaptations of this principle were submitted. The prime objection to mechanical tuning-pins, first introduced in pianos in 1800 by John Isaac Hawkins, and tried again from time to time, is in the fact that the elasticity of the wire is rebellious to a method of tuning that proceeds throughout by very small degrees. The string requires to be drawn up boldly, so as to give at once the tension intended. Without this the operation of tuning becomes tedious to the ear, which tires with a process which, through the slow and uncertain response due to the points of friction, seems interminable. [See Pianoforte, Tone, Tuning.]

[ A. J. H. ]

1. Wrest from wrastan, A.S., to strain a string to a required tension; O.E. wrest, a tuning hammer or key.

   The claricord hath a tunely kynde,
   As the wyre is wrested high and lowe.-Skelton.