FREE FALLING FALLBOARD

[Avery Todd]

Jim,

   Just a few comments. Considering the customers refusal to pay for the
required work, is it possible the same thing happened to the previous
tuner? Was the piano maybe even more flat than 40 cents (80-100 cents)?
Perhaps he was only allowed to tune it once also, and tuned it where it
was. So are you sure it was "work performed poorly"?
  I refuse to judge a previous tuners' work after 12 months. You just don't
know what condition the piano was in at that time or the climate conditions
it's been exposed to since.
   For this reason, my personal inclination is to not do the work unless
I'm allowed to do what needs to be done to have a good result. That way no
one coming behind me, or the customer, can complain that it wasn't tuned
correctly. Maybe they like the tuning, maybe they don't. But it was tuned
to the best of my, and the instrument's, ability.
   So, to protect my reputation, if I want to keep the customer, I will
either do the extra work for free or I will turn down the job. Besides a
piano is designed to be at 440 to be at its best.
   I also have never seen a slow-fall mechanism on a Kimball. Kawai has an
excellent one and maybe some others, also. But Kimball? Good luck with a
sticky situation.

Avery

>While tuning a Kimball Grand for a first-time customer, I immediately
>realized that the piano was on average about 40 cents flat.  The piano
>was manufactured in 1994, and the owner claimed that the piano had been
>tuned within the last 12 months.  The owner also expressed
>dissatisfaction with her previous technician, claiming that the tech,
>while tuning her piano, had removed the fallboard, and while in the
>process, had broken the slow-fall mechanism on the fallboard.
>  1.  How difficult is it to repair the fallboard?
>  2.  When confronted with a piano requiring a pitch raise, and the
>owner refuses to pay charges beyond a standard tuning fee, do you (a)
>refuse to do the work, (b) tune the piano at current pitch  (c) spend
>the extra time and do the job right for the standard fee?
>  3.  How does one handle customers when they speak ill of other piano
>techs, especially when it is obvious that the previous work was
>performed poorly?
>
>                                    JIM

_____________________________________
Avery Todd, RPT
Moores School of Music
University of Houston
713-743-3226
atodd@uh.edu
_____________________________________