Thanks, Bill Spurlock, for your leading questions. <<Have you had a chance to evaluate strike ratio of modern Yamaha and Kawai actions, and how do they compare to your ideal of 5.5 of the Hamburg Steinway?>> The only non-Steinway piano I've surveyed was a Baldwin L. David I know has done at least one Yamaha (a C7). I've always marveled that Steinway has to hit and miss at putting a good action together, and Yamaha seems to hit it every time. I've always assumed that it was a matter of locating the plate front-to-back, and then trimming the under side of the rim at the arms to control the string height. Regardless, I'd like to do a full survey just to see what a Yamaha looks like <<Next, I've wondered about the effect of wippen assist springs as used on some Schwander and now Korean actions. Are there situations where the springs (if quite strong) hurt repetition speed and reliability by working against jack return?>> All the springs do is to counter balance the weight of the hammers, just as front leads do. I would love to find out more, but for as much as I know, the critical motion for repetition is for the wippen to drop low enough for the jack fly to leave the let-off button. Remember that the spring is strongest in the rest position, and most of repetition's critical motion occurs at the top of the wippen's swing, at the point of weakest spring pressure. But there's more to fast and deep repetition than simply balance weight and inertia. Ken Sloane has been working on it for years. It's not just a strong rep spring. And it's not just solid pinning at the hammer flange and rep lever. Ken thinks that high checking is necessary, but one of the things that the NH Chapter's Junior Science Project hopes to find out (among others) is whether the tail and check ever do contact during the deep and fast, or for that matter the jack button and spoon, and the front rail punching and the key. I think repetition and inertia share common concerns, but at a certain point begin to be solved separately. David's system does one thing, to tune up mass and leverage (and believe me, they can be badly out of tune). It does one thing and does it beautifully. As LaRoy Edwards once said, "Nobody builds the perfect piano. We simply remove the obstacles to a perfect piano." Sort of like a sculptor and his block of marble
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