Stanwood rote 1/17/96: <<I once replaced a Chickering Brown action with modern Herz-Erard type parts, using the old stack rails and modifying the balance rail position. The old wips were "fanned" so I made vertical cuts on each flange where they meet the rail to match the angle. >> I once replaced a Chickering 123 action using Pratt, Read parts and Clemanson action brackets. (I made my own hammer and rep rails so the new hammer and rep centers would sit in the same spot as the old ones.) Of course the shanks and reps were fanned. New Japanese copy P,R shanks dropped right on the rail, an exact match. The rep flanges were a different story. The old ones had horizontally nounted milled-brss flanges (1/8" thick). The new rep wooden flanges were the full thickness, which meant that with their increased dimension, the thickness of the shank rest rail needed to be correspondingly decreased. I squeaked by with a strip of felt covered aluminum as a rest rail. If I had my router-in-a-radial-arm-saw-yolk operational I suppose I could have notched the back of the rep rail at the angles specified by the fan. That would have alowed me the conventional veritcal mounting of the rep flanges Presumably with the damper underlever flanges, you could also either mount them horizontally making whatever correction in the hieght of that top surface of the underlever tray was necessary to insure that the center didn't mount when you changed its mounting from vertical to horizontal. Or as David describes, you could notch the from wall of the tray so that the notch that each flange was fastened to was at the angle required to produce the fan. The you have to insure that as the angle of each lever changes across the fan, that the resulting hypotenuses will bring the front ends of the levers into a straight line which can meet the straight line at the key ends. (If you heat wood up, it'll stretch like taffy, right?) (Chris Robinson and Rick Baldassin know how to do all this stuff and will be glad to field questions, even at 5:30AM <g>.) Bill Ballard RPT NH Chapter PTG "There are day people and there are night people, and they will unconsciously seek each other out so they can drive each other crazy".......AM Radio Psychologist Dr. Joy Browne
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