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The cause of the tuning instability when angled is probably the outer springs having to rotate very slightly on the hooks, rather than the different tensions - which are simply summed anyway since both the claw and the bock are rigid.
For the same reason there is no advantage to angling the claw to put different tensions on one side or the other.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Dan Erlewine says in one of his books the angled myth may have arose from the simple fact that it’s less fiddly to hook them on in the outer holes than the holes that allow them to be parallel.
I think this is one of the many things in guitars that scientifically has a right answer but makes absolutely no difference to anyone in the real world.
Even if this was true, the differences would be so slight only Eric Johnson would claim to be able to tell.
I switched them back to being parallel and noticed absolutely no difference
If that's right then I think I understand!
My take away from the convo was that for 9-42s and below, two springs may be best, anything thicker use 3. Placing the outer two at an angle gives the strings a bit more stretch to counter. This is all to do with tuning stability: the springs have to have the strings making them work a bit, not letting them rest .
For a given distance between the trem block and the claw, and assuming they're parallel, an angled spring will have more tension because it's spanning over a slightly bigger distance - it's the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle rather than the adjacent or opposite. However, the increase in length for the particular triangle is about 1% (about 70mm straight, 10mm wide = hypotenuse of 70.71mm).
If the guitar was initially set up with the springs straight, and then some were angled, the tension applied by the springs slightly increases and the strings go slightly sharp. To compensate, either the claw is adjusted again (outwards), or the angle of the bridge at rest slightly changes (lowers) when the strings are retuned (dropped slightly in pitch).
In the end, what you have is a bunch of springs that apply the same tension whether they are straight or angled, due to implementing one or other (or a bit of both) of the two geometric changes described above. They must do because the strings when tuned to pitch apply a fixed tension which the springs have to counteract at equilibrium.
Note this...
It's not to do with whether a spring is angled, as such, but that increase in spring tension is proportional to increase in length. In other words, a conventional expansion spring, which is what we have in a trem system, has a linear increase in tension - a spring that increases by, say, 10g of tension (or about 0.1N of tensile force) per 1mm of stretch, will increase by that amount whether its starting point is stretched a little or a lot - ie, whether it's straight or angled. What this means is that, on a guitar that's tuned to pitch, the force applied by the player to the trem arm that causes the strings to change pitch by a given amount stays the same whether the springs are angled or straight.Nomad
Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jivin' too...
but your post said what I was going to say anyhow but a bit more sciencey
I'm wondering if the whole point of the crows foot spring config is where someone found that with the string gauge and tuning combination they were using, 3 springs in parallel were too few to achieve zero float and 4 or 5 springs in parallel were too many because the claw screws can only provide a limited amount of adjustment..
the crows foot config could have solved the prob and from there the idea just caught on...
just theory.. maybe total shite that I just made up in an attempt to understand how is config could have came about...
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein