Susan Kline wrote: > Looking after upright Yamahas in churches, under heavy use the pedal rod > for the right pedal (metal cylinder, teflon end caps with metal pins) > can fail. 'Tain't Teflon. More likely a polystyrene or some such. Miserable things, belonging in pianos with left side lid hinges and 300lb one piece front board/fall board monoliths. Oh, wait... >Once the top end insert gets loose it's pretty well toast. I > replaced a couple of these metal dowels with good old fashioned wooden > dowels and metal pins (half of a balance rail keypin works well, with > the sawed end inside the dowel, of course.), FR punching on the bottom > end, BR punching (thick) on the top end, bushing cloth strips in the > lever hole for noise abatement. Damper rod hangers work very nicely. They're the right length, and already fluted on one end. > Since it's frequent to find exactly this setup in pianos over 100 years > old, still working perfectly, one wonders why companies ever went to > rubber bushings and teflon fittings, which often break or degrade in a > decade or two. Seems to me that in the last twenty years or so, dowels became alien. The more or less standard birch dowel of my childhood has disappeared from hardware stores - which have also disappeared. What passes for dowels now is some randomly unfamiliar open grained directionally challenged pseudo hardwood, that seems to be a different species every time I go looking for dowel stock. Yea, I know I can order maple dowels and have them UPS'd directly to my door for only six times the price, but it aggravates me to find the kind of junk that's being stocked locally when I need something now. Maybe that's why the manufacturers went to the plastic ends on metal tubing, because they couldn't get decent wooden dowels. Ron N
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC