In a message dated 8/16/99 11:17:43 AM Pacific Daylight Time, jpage@capecod.net writes: About 15 years ago, Willis Snyder was advocating a conversion to the Baldwin plate and hitch pin system when rebuilding grands (or "remanufacturing" as he rightfully called his very completely rebuilt pianos). He mostly rebuilt Steinways so it was adventurous of him to use one company's patented system design on their principal competitor's pianos. I don't know if he still does this because I have been out of the rebuilding business for over ten years and haven't followed his trends. At the time, it seemed like a great idea: a way to locate the plate very precisely, then whatever you couldn't accomplish with that in the way of down bearing could be finely adjusted with the Accu-just hitch pins. An added bonus was that you would never need to tighten the plate bolts and you would never have any of the negative effects of loose plate bolts. Whatever he thinks of the idea now, good, bad or indifferent, I'm sure he would be happy to tell you his opinion and how well the pianos he remanufactured that way did. I have seen that the new Walter Grands have a different kind of hitch pin. It looks like the ones that Baldwin uses now but I don't know anything about how they are locating the plate. Bill Bremmer RPT
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