S & S 'D' Problems - So what happened?

Avery Todd atodd@UH.EDU
Thu Feb 21 06:38 MST 2002


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Nothing yet. Still trying to find out a couple of things. Hopefully,
it'll get done soon though and I'll post what happened. Thanks.

Avery

>Avery-
>So what happened?
>
>David Skolnik
>
>
>
>At 12:44 PM 02/03/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>
>>List,
>>
>>Warning. This may be a fairly long post. Here's the background.
>>
>>Our newer 'D' (1997) went back to the dealership for some work. The
>>extremely high humidity after the flood last summer had affected some
>>things, mainly the damper system. I had thought about completely
>>re-regulating it this summer but because the music desk was so tight it
>>almost took Godzilla to get it out, I decided to wait and see if things
>>would return to some semblance of normal
>>after it started drying out. They mostly did, including the music desk
>>problem. It's fine now.
>>
>>Anyway, the dealer had heard about us having some problems with the
>>piano, so he offered to bring it in and have his techs do some work on
>>it before the festival at no charge to us. Hey, why not? :-) Freed me
>>up to do other things.
>>
>>I've talked to the shop tech and he told me that he'd had to raise the
>>stack some because the hammers weren't hitting correctly. My first
>>question is what effect would that have to how the action would then
>>have to be regulated?
>>
>>OK, now the problems. I had to pull the action Saturday to do something
>>or other and accidently discovered that a lot of the hammers are now
>>resting on the backchecks. Even to the point of being able to hear a
>>noise when they hit and there's no bounce at all on many of them.
>>Especially from the upper middle, all the way down to the end. Also, if
>>you put your hand on the hammer and slowly press the key, you can feel a
>>slight rub on many of them in that area. And no, it's not the tail 
>>that's rubbing. :-) If the hammer should happen to come back too 
>>hard, it could
>>cause it to be caught by the backcheck. That happened on one note with
>>Angela Chang (Janina Fialkowska's substitute). I corrected a few by
>>changing the angle of the backcheck just a little and got through the
>>concert OK.
>>
>>I checked a few things and found that the dip is well over 10mm on the
>>whites, the hammer blow is at least 2", the drop is way too much and
>>there is plenty of aftertouch, in not too much in some cases. However
>>the basic feel is fairly decent, maybe even on the light side. 
>>Almost "dangerously light", as Anton put it.
>>
>>If I raise the hammer line to where I normally like to have it (around
>>1 3/4" or so, that's going to seriously increase the aftertouch. Even
>>raising it to 1 7/8" would cause a problem and I don't think I can
>>decrease the dip enough to compensate for that. There's also not enough
>>room to be able to lower the whites any. They're already about as low as
>>they can be.
>>
>>That brings me back to my first question. Would raising the stack have
>>made these compromises necessary? Especially the excessive hammer blow?
>>
>>Any suggestions on what to do to correct the problem(s). I haven't had
>>a chance yet to check the backcheck height in relation to letoff. That's
>>one possibility but I'm not quite ready to jump in and start 
>>lowering backchecks just yet, until I know what's really happening 
>>here. The
>>problem was not there before the tech raised the stack.
>>
>>Got any comments Horace? Anyone else? I'm going to have to get on it
>>this week, so any quick help would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>Sorry about the length of this. It just takes a bit to explain all this.
>>I'm also going to send this to the caut list, so sorry about any
>>duplication for some of you.
>>
>>Regards,
>>Avery
>>
>>P.S. At least they corrected some of the problems with the damper lift,
>>even though I don't really like the damping, either.

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