Hi Rex, I'm pretty sure I don't agree with this statement at all. I once worked at a Steinway dealership where the other two techs couldn't rebush a damper guide rail bushing on a new Steinway they'd pushed out with the umbrella tool, and the bushing hadn't been the problem that caused the sluggish damping in the first place. I definitely know of Yamaha dealers that either don't do any service follow up at all (the customer just calls who they want to), or hire "tooners" for the floor that read a book to learn how to tune. There is AMPLE profit margin built into piano sales to cover service. But when dealers discount pianos 40% off of list to make a sale, (because they'd rather make the sale than lose it to a cheaper, cheaply made competitor) that's where they're shooting their own selves in the foot. On a floor tuning on a Hyundai grand once, I decided to take it upon myself to voice down the rocks the manufacturer had installed on the ends of the hammershanks. A couple weeks later, one of the salespeople asked me could I do that again, and what would it cost. There is a value to store prep, and it pays off in the LONG RUN, if dealers would just look a little past right this minute. In answer to Rex's earlier question about what is required for dealer prep, it depends on what the piano is capable of, what it needs to get there, and how it comes in to the dealer. With Asian pianos, I generally find the rep springs much too fast, and often the letoff and drop has been lowered to compensate for it, so that the hammers won't double strike. In that case, it won't be long before further settling takes place and you can't play pianissimo (or turn the volume level down on the Pianodisk) without missing notes. After some time, not immediately after uncrating, screws will need tightening, or they may not. Cheaper grands will always benefit from some sort of "bulk voicing". You may run across some damper problems that slipped through Quality Control. You just have to kind of go through each piano and see. You kind of develop your own standard of what you feel is presentable as a "new piano" and apply that to everything on the floor. If you're delivering pianos in the crate, that means you're leaving the standards up to the manufacturer because you have none. Jeff ----- Original Message ----- From: Rex Roseman I would contend that almost all of the techs working on the floor could deal with almost all of the problems. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091123/be85b419/attachment-0001.htm>
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