Hi Dave I was refering to agraffes and not the entire scope of piano building. And it seems to me that with very few exceptions most of the newer instruments I've seen in the past say.... 15 years anyways have had less then optimal quality control in this area. Addressing the entire scope of design, all the problems surrounding that and manufacturing realities, marketing realities, and the realities about both pianists conceptions/misconceptions and our own as piano technicians seemed to be a bit off the subject matter of agraffe alignment, tho to be sure a potentially very interesting discussion in its own right. But back to the topic of this thread... Strikes me that there has been a general industry wide decline in agraffe quality in the last 15-20 years. Cheers RicB That's not been my observation. To generalize (and I really dislike generalizing) American manufacturers have in the past been more likely to innovate and redesign and improve. Currently they're not doing that! Major design improvements have not been part of the picture since early in the last century. Asian manufacturers - on the other hand - generally have not redesigned or innovated but have been much better at the precision of their work. Even the new Shigeru Kawai pianos, wonderful as they are, have no design improvements. They are just copies of the same old designs but much more precision in the execution. Pianos are made of 3 things - design, materials and execution. In my view the manufacturer that started this small thread has used very good materials. Those good materials have been used on old, old designs and executed in very sloppy fashion. Asian manufacturers have used these same antique designs with somewhat less wonderful materials but have done it with much more precise execution. This leaves us only old designs. Then we do get the choice of excellent materials put together poorly, or somewhat lesser materials assembled much more precisely. I think that is why most in our community have continued to opt for the excellent materials because we have the know how to tidy up the poor workmanship. We complain about it, but this is the piano business as we know it. dave
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