String break

[mispeltyoof]

Guy selling Hofner President says the original ebony tailpiece has been replaced by a Hofner metal one as the ebony kept cutting the strings at the tailpiece. Sounds odd to me anyone got any experience of this?any comments?0

[oldane]

A tailpiece which causes string break is a sign of poor design, not a function of the material used. I have had a Benedetto guitar with an ebony tailpiece for 15 years, and it has never broken a string. Neither has my guitars with metal tailpieces.

That said, a well designed metal tailpiece should work problem free, though an ebony one may be better if sympathetic resonances in the metal tailpiece gets on ones nerves. Some of the greatest sounding archtops ever made (say original D'Angelicos and Strombergs) all had metal tailpieces. Ebony tailpieces was for all I know never used before Jimmy D'Aquisto began to use them on his instruments in the 1960s.

In my 45 years of guitar playing, I have rarely experienced string break, but when it has happened, it has aways been where the string attaches to the tuning gear post and only when I repeatedly loosen and retighten the strings thereby tiring the string metal where it bends sharply (has happened when I tried out various bridge saddles).

[mr. beaumont]

I'm pretty sure the hofner ebony tailpiece is a wood cap on a metal frame. It's not like a benedetto piece.

Probably just had a small metal burr or something on it, that was wearing the string when under tension.