hammermaker's corner 3.

[Richard Brekne]

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I do hope somebody is saving all these.... a bit of editing,
perhaps a tad rewrite and we got a great article / series for the
Journal... hey... a bit of er... colour and we may even have a
movie...grin.. I can see it now... we could get Robin Williams to
play the part of Isaac... He's great at this kinda thing....

Seriously tho... great reading so far... more more !!

isaacah wrote:

> Ari Isaac.
>
> Hammermaker’s corner3.
>
>
>
> Boyceville NY is a lovely small town, or is it a village, in
> the Catskill Mountains. Lots of woods, fresh air and quiet, you
> hardly know you’ve passed through, that’s how small it is.
>
> Everyone was at lunch by the time we arrived, Dave and I, at
> Ronson that day. Marty Negron suggested we go for lunch and
> look at the plant after. He told us where we could find a nice
> place for lunch and we found it easily.
>
> Chicken soup with Matzaballs high up on the everyday menu? I
> was a bit surprised. I asked the owner, who was also the
> waitress about it. She said she’d worked with a Jewish woman
> somewhere who’d taught her how to make chicken soup. I ordered
> a bowl and when I tasted it I realized at once that this was
> not the kind of ordinary chicken soup to soothe the sniffles,
> no. This was the kind of chicken soup that restored your sense
> of self. The kind that made you know for certain that this
> world is the best place to be living in. The very kind of
> chicken soup God revealed to king Solomon, the wisest of men
> who had a thousand wives, one night at the beginning of king
> Solomon’s reign, along with many other wisdoms and secrets and
> God warned Solomon to reveal the recipe to no more than one
> hundred and thirty five of his 1000 wives on pain of loosing
> his wisdom. Solomon was not in the habit of taking too much
> notice of what God instructed. After all, when you’re the
> wisest of men what God says to do or not loses some of its
> importance. He knew, though, in his gut, that this time God was
> not kidding and he made sure to reveal the recipe to no more
> than 135, or was it 137. After making love, that week, to 132
> of the 547 wives currently resident in the harem, just at the
> moment he was about to initiate foreplay with the 133d, a
> country girl whose taste in these matters he wasn’t sure of,
> king Solomon had a momentary lapse of memory so he ended up
> revealing the secret of the chicken soup to two more wives than
> God had allowed. What is certain is that those two wives
> disappeared from this world very soon after and were condemned
> to be the progenitors of semi intelligent life on a another
> planet in a far off galaxy.
>
> When we came back to Ronson Marty Negron showed me the entire
> process and helped me to my first significant realization about
> hammer making.
>
> He showed me the cutting of the felt sheet into strips and the
> next step was the pre-pressing of the strips. They were put
> into a press, dry, no glue and pressed into the cawl, or the
> former of the strike point to shoulder radius of the hammer by
> a steel ruler as long as the strip of felt. The strip was left
> in that press for a few minutes and then taken out.
>
> Something didn’t make sense to me at that moment. I had been
> taught, like everyone else in the piano business, that hammer
> felt had to have resilience. If so, why pre-press it. After the
> pre-pressing, when I looked at the strip from its bass or
> treble end, it was no longer flat but had been forced into the
> shape of a letter V. It appeared to me (and it still does) that
> whatever resilience there had been in that felt before – it, or
> most of it, was gone now. What is certain is that the press
> used to, actually, glue up the hammers, can be considerably
> weaker once the felt strips are pre-pressed. That energy, the
> very one not needed now to finally press the hammers is taken
> away from producing tone – that became obvious to me that day
> at Ronson.
>
> I resolved right there and then never to pre-press any felt I
> was going to use and to have my felt made with the absolute
> maximum resilience, spring, possible to build in.
>
> Thinking about the pre-pressing it became obvious to me that,
> thinking backwards, pre-pressing to those hammer makers who
> used this way, made sense only if it was effective in getting
> the felt strip to accept and retain the letter V shape forced
> onto it by the steel ruler pushing the felt into the cawl. If
> the felt those hammer makers ordered was too springy to retain
> the V shape pre-pressing would be ineffective, ergo…
> pre-pressing meant, and means today since, I believe Steinways,
> Renner and a few others continue to pre-press, ordering felt
> sheets with less spring. No more than acceptable for the strip
> to retain the letter V shape.
>
> The presses used to glue up the hammers were very hot, I
> estimated they were heated to 180-200F. The hammers, at that
> time, were left in the press for 20 minutes. I touched the felt
> it seemed to me, at that time, that the density of their strips
> was fairly uniform from bass to treble, something didn’t quite
> come together in my head. That something became the conviction,
> embodied in the felt I use to make Isaac hammers, that the
> hammer-string impact has to match the taughtness of the strings
> being struck. In the bass, where the strings aren’t very
> taught, the hammer needs to, as it were, chase the vibrating
> string and keep pushing energy into it so it must be a bit less
> dense. As the strings become more taught towards the treble the
> same, relatively softer hammer will simply damp the tone
> completely unless, that is, the felt is denser and the hammer
> is harder. Not harder as in inflexible but like a gradually
> stiffer spring is harder than a softer spring.
>
> The next big step, for me, was now the building of a hammer
> press and both felt and hammer cutting equipment.

--
Richard Brekne
RPT, N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway
mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no


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