Optimization and evaluation of crucial properties for stainless steel wire used as guitar strings

The musical wire is a topic not well explored and almost no earlier reports could be found about it. Therefore, many experimental methods and testing machines had to be invented. One of them being the unusual relaxation machine built from scratch. Many different experiments have been carried out for the understanding of a good guitar string, few of which showed to be of little or no interest. An ordinary guitar string is made of regular high carbon steel alloy drawn to different wire diameters. Carbon steel has many good qualities but also some major drawbacks. The corrosion properties of carbon steels are not as good as stainless steels’, on the other hand it is easier to draw carbon steels to higher tensile and yield strengths without encountering brittleness. The result of this project shows that ***** and ***** two of many Sandvik stainless steels tested, are well suited for the musical wire application. Although they have quite different properties in many ways, both can be used as guitar strings. The former for electric guitars and the latter as acoustic guitar strings. These stainless steels are very likely in the soon future to be a big revolution for the guitar string business.Validerat; 20101217 (root