stuck

[Richard Moody]

Stephen and List, 
	Thanks for your  replies. May there be many more.  Of course those who
have seen a player action, see three tiers stacked on top of each other,
so "stack".  Now how apparent the mechanism that sits on top of the key
frame is called a "stack" is beyond me, but if that is how it is called in
the factory, I guess that should be good enough for us mere mortals. ; ) .
 Oh perhaps its just an East Coast thing.  You know how we like to be
humorous on this list. 

	Which of course is how your comment about HTs was taken. 
But now that you have brought it up... : ))  I am wondering if indeed
there is some knowledge of historic temperaments at Steinway.  Jorgensen
in "Tuning....."  presents much evidence that ET was not and could not be
tuned until after Helmholtz and others published research on string
frequencies and partials. This was in the 1890's.  Before that he claims
the temperaments were either Mean Tone or others. Now since Steinway has
built pianos since the 1850's one wonders what tuning was recommended for
their instruments. It would be of great interest if somehwere in the
Steinway archives there were tuning instructions for the factory and field
technician.  
	We know that Helmholtz and Theodore Steinway collaborated for many years
to build a piano on the most advanced scientific principals  as Alfred
Dolge so eloquently
waxes.  Surely they must have had conversations on tuning, given that
Helmholtz had much to do in the research of partials, and their relation
to beats. Supposidly both took a great deal of notes.   What great
interest this would be to techncians.  
	So my question is, does such an archive exist, and can it be accessed? 

	Richard Moody

----------
> From: tech@steinway.com
> To: 'pianotech@ptg.org'
> Subject: RE: stuck
> Date: Monday, July 27, 1998 8:22 AM
> 
> Richard and List,
> 
> Sorry for the linguistic shorthand.  In the factory we call it an
"action 
> stack" which gets shortened to "stack"...
................

> By the way, we would love to post regularly, but we don't know anything 
> about historic temperaments, CA glue, or digital tuners ;-)
> 
> 
> Stephen Dove
> Steinway & Sons
> New York
> 
>