Doug writes: > >It >is my understanding that Steinway would advocate spacing the hammers so they >look even and then de-travel them so they hit the string correctly. I believe >it is minor and mostly limited to the tenor section. BTW, this technique is >not published in their manual. This was my initial question because I found >travel paper (alot of it) located on both sides of the flange. I attended one of the Steinway factory seminars a few years back when Bill Garlick was the Guru in residence. From what we were told that week, you've got it right. The hammer spacing must look good FIRST, then I guess it's assumed that any traveling deviations aren't harmful enough to worry about. This is, of course, contrary to the way we were all taught to do it. I would guess that there are about a jillion Steinways out there in consumerland right now in their original "uncorrected" state with their respective "keyboard operators" being blissfully unaware of the non parallelism of their tenor shanks! Horrors! Anyway, Bill's suggestion was to fix it if it bothered you because Steinway weren't going to change the way they did things on your account. Sounds like good advice to me. In anyone's reasonably complete list of "things piano manufacturers ought to do differently" it seems fairly harmless compared to a lot of other manufacturing transgressions by a lot of different manufacturers. It just seems that a bit of tarnish on an ICON is more alarming to more people than an outright disaster in a product that isn't on the oficial wannabe list. >I don't want >to kick a dead horse but if this discussion continues I'm sure it would lead >to the old discussion of what is the best material if any to put on the >hammer rail such as cloth, sandpaper etc. > >Doug Hershberger, RPT How about Dragon Skin? I'm kidding... really! <grin> Hope this helps you, 'cause I'll probably catch hell for it. :-) Ron Nossaman
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