Well Ron...here it goes. The Yamaha fanatic has the answer you desire. They use the laminations for added strength, since so many Yamaha's are used in institutions and commercial applications. It is a great design and the wood is beech. Ed Tomlinson << Hi Gang, You know, it's really tough to try to imagine what's possible when you don't even know what's been done, and what's out there under your own nose. I did a service bond on a Yamaha GH1B today and got to looking at the hammer tail shaping. All the tails had identical horizontal striations, like they were shaped by one transverse pass of a shaped drum sander that trimmed the shank, and shaped the tail all at once. I doubt that they were mounted on the action rail at the time, but it would still be interesting to see how this is done. Meanwhile, I noticed the rather dark color of the shanks and took a closer look at them too. I was wondering what kind of wood that was, when I noticed that both sides of the flange yoke were laminated! It looked like three plies per side. Since plain old maple, or whatever, has proven to be plenty strong for the job, I assumed this was intended to somewhat stabilize the dimensional changes with humidity swings, rather than for strength. Does anyone know for sure? >>
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