At 08:21 AM 8/17/2009, Chris wrote: >Lately since "firm but free" (or is it "as free as possible without >making noise?") has taken over action center design this problem has come back. I'm glad you agree, Chris. I see another problem with "as free as possible". If one considers the idea of leeway, one can imagine a sliding scale of pin firmness and spring tension, within which an action will work. The "free as possible" takes one to the very end of this leeway, toward the loose side. Then the piano is played for a few years ... and one is over the end into "too loose, too little friction", and we have a fly-away action, and maybe even a little of the double-note CAF we've been talking about. It also is ready to be a noisy action, and a piano which is hard to play very softly with any control. If we are talking about a concert rental situation, before we reach this state they are getting ready to sell it and buy a nice new one, and more power to them. Those ex-concert-rentals make such wonderful pianos for private owners, with just a little bit of work. I can't imagine how difficult it must be in places with damp summers and dry winters, if the pianos are set very free in the summertime, and then come November ......... Anyway, it's a nice ideal to set up a piano to get the last scintilla of performance from it, the letoff tight as tight, the drop tight to match (just a twitch), the aftertouch regulated to a hair so that the tight drop doesn't lead to blocking hammers, the actions free as possible so that springs are weaker, touch is lighter, and hammers are set so that they JUST BARELY do not double-strike. Then the slightest thing happens ... wear or weather ... and we have trouble. Bobbling hammers, blocking hammers, cheating jacks, poor repetition. I have found this over and over when rebuilders (and they were good ones) have tried to put tight regulations on pianos with unplayed new parts. Over and over again I've found blocking hammers, especially in the treble. One just has to go back over everything, and give it at least a little bit of leeway, a safety factor -- not to the point of making it sloppy, but just accepting that in the real world, stuff happens, including compression of new letoff button punchings. I might describe regulating with at least a little safety factor as moving back a foot or two from the edge of the precipice. There's a joke -- I can't remember the source -- about determining letoff distance by the distance traveled to get to the piano. Five minutes away -- 1/32" or less. Fifty miles -- 1/16". 1000 miles -- 1/3" <grin, I _think_> Susan Kline -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20090817/c2d3bc57/attachment-0001.htm>
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