Jim writes: << a 5'7" Sohmer with agraffes on the main bridge. In doing the pitch raise, I did NOT over-pull on this one - not on a piano this old with an unknown history. Nevertheless, when I got up into the treble, strings began to break. Then it dawned on me: Just eyeballing it, the speaking lengths of those treble strings looked abnormally long to me. I did some measuring, and indeed whey were. The speaking length of No. 88 was like 2.5 inches, and A5 was like about two inches longer than on most modern pianos. And that's not all. I measured some wire sizes. The entire top two octaves were strung with #12.5 wire. As I say, it had been restrung. Whatever the original size wire was, I don't know.<< Greetings, I just finished a Cupid Model Sohmer with this same set of problems. Carl Meyer wrote a very nice sounding scale for this piano, but the lengths are excessively long. Even the new scaling required a couple of octaves of one wire size, but the piano does tune a lot better than the original. >>I could not find any evidence that any bridges or the plate had been moved from the original positions. So, I'm thinking that "brassy" sound Otto was hearing may have been due to the scaling of the piano, and not to the agraffes themselves.<< These pianos have their own sound, and it is pretty bright. Softening the hammers doesn't seem to add a whole lot of fundamental, either. I did get nice sustain out of this one, but the tonal qualities just aren't there, to my ear. I don't think I will attempt to salvage another one. >> Regards, Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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