Yesterday I got into a practice room to try to do some regulation and voicing. Steinway L 379590 (1962) Practice room After replacing moth-eaten felt and punchings and doing basic regulation, I returned the action to the piano for a “breaking-in” period to compress those punchings. While attempting to do fine regulation and preparation for voicing, I discovered a situation which, IMMHO, makes the instrument almost unusable. The symptoms were a stiff una corda pedal, sharp keys clicking on the fallboard and naturals rubbing on the keyslip if I removed some shims. I have a number of warped keyslips which I have had to shim to keep the naturals from rubbing, and I've had to deal with sharps clicking on the fallboard, but I'd never had a piano which did both. Head scratching/beard pulling time... then came the impure thoughts... After relining the damper pitman hole through the keybed to make _that_ pedal work smoothly, I went on to work the una corda and had a eureka! moment. I saw that the keyframe guide pins were bent fore/aft. Now just _why_ would someone, in their infinite wisdom, do that?? It appears that the source of all these problems goes back to a sloppy job of recovering the keys. In order to save time/money, someone removed the original keytops (ivory), but failed to remove the fronts. They slapped one-piece keytops over everything. The new keytops with their attached fronts thus made the keys longer and they now rubbed on the keyslip. Shimming out the keyslip was not enough to compensate, so the keyframe guide pins were bent to shift the action (and keys) back. Doing this made the backs of the sharp keys click on the fallboard, and shifting into una corda position pushes them even further into the fallboard. The only remedy is to re-recover the keys, making sure that the original keyfronts are removed so that when recovered, the keys have room to operate. So much for time spent on regulation so far... So much for the "good deal" the college got on a used re-somethingorothered piano. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh Conrad Hoffsommer - Who, at the very least, knows where he is: 43°18.685N, 91°48.09W mailto:hoffsoco@luther.edu
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