DIY Leather Strings

One forum friend from Denmark posted about leather picks. Thanks to him.

Well , why string built with gut but not with leather ?

Can we tape steel string with leather or can we make bare leather strings ?

thank you,

Mustafa Umut Sarac
Istanbul

 

Its a good idea. I think bare leather strings is a problem where there are gut strings but no leather strings. I think problem is to create few layers of leather glued and than sliced and than rounded with rotating abrasive heads at 3 corners of the string. You can atomise iron nanoparticles in a glue on to some area of string.

Taping is a good idea but finding uitable leather everytime would be very expensive. It would be expensive to find suitable leather research also.

 

Taping would be expensive but bare leather would be much cheaper and easier. In baroque times , metal strings were drawing from metal hole.

I think , gluing , slicing , drawing the sliced leather from knife edges would be much easier than making gut strings. During gluing the leather , you can put a steel wire in to the composite and no need to tape wound.

Its an economic craft also.

There is much more and lot cheaper than all above. Its using high quality artificial leather polyurethane resin to coat the entire string with single dip in to resin. I bought a extra cheap artificial leather shoe and its good.

There are 40000 different polyurethane resin in the world and there must be lot suitable.

 

I have just looked in to leather-ese artificial leather repair tape and I think problem would be streching and and due cracking of the leather or artificial leather.

Well , elixir coats their strings with gore tex core resin and same can be done with polyurethane foam resin also , this was a new idea.

Now , let me learn that if we stretch the string on bass , how many centimeters we would need to wind the tuner to achieve real tension , when we learn it and divide to the lenght of string , we would learn the needed strenght to stretch.

Can you help ?

 

Thank you Martin , Great Forum. Now , lets talk about strips of leather. Do you think rectangular section of hide strip, works as a string on bass ? I am thinking there is no need of metal , 1 dollars worth of large circular piezo sensor might sense everything and send to amp.

I think rectangular - flat - strip might be more peaceful to left hand. I will research the subject.

 

The strings are made of different strength of nylon fishing line (in former times twisted strips of hide). The thicker bass strings are sometimes made by twisting thinner ones until they have 2/3/4 times the strength

twisting is necessary for kora.