just a moment of your time

[Tom Cole]

Phil,

The thing that's most likely to happen, by far, on a serious pitch raise
is that you'll break a string. Not that this isn't a little traumatic
for you, the tuner, especially if it's the last piano on Friday evening
and you don't know how many more are going to break. Sooner or later,
string breakage happens, though you do your best to prevent it -
knocking the pin a little flat before pulling it up, no overpull on the
first pitch raise, spraying silicone on the bearing points. Okay, okay,
I'm kidding about the silicone but I've never ruined a piano with Liquid
Wrench, if you want to be conservative about pitch raising.

Anyway, my point is that, if the instrument was designed to be tuned to
standard pitch, then, structurally speaking, it should be able to do it
even at an advanced age. Yes, there are stories about exploding, or
imploding, pianos but I've never actually talked with anyone with such
experience or have seen such a disaster myself. Does anyone have
pictures of a piano that folded in half or whatever? I'd like to see
that.

I'm sure you've heard Jim Coleman's metaphor of how much of the
bulldog's tail would you cut off at a time? I wouldn't take it too
literally on a 300-cents-flat piano, though. I'd rather that there be
two pitch raises, the second with overpull, followed by a smooth tuning,
all in the same visit. Then another tuning in a few months. You might be
able to get away with doing some overpull on the first go around and
finish up with a somewhat smooth tuning on the second pass but don't if
it's your last piano on Friday night. The reason I say this is that I'm
not as apt to be careful with the overpull on the first pass.

This reminds me of a demonstration someone put on at Tuner's Supply
(Sunnyvale, CA) where they pitch-raised an old upright then whacked the
back of the soundboard with a rubber-headed mallet. Supposedly (I wasn't
there), the blows dealt to the backs of the bridges enabled the strings
to pull through the bridge pins and a very noticeable drop in pitch was
witnessed. This was either an illustration of the dynamics of a pitch
raise or the depths of boredom that can be reached in a piano supply
house.

Tom

Phil Bondi wrote:
> 
> A440A@AOL.COM wrote:
> 
> > Greetings,
> >    I am not sure I understand.   How do you know that a fast pitch raise,
> > followed by a careful tuning, would not have done the same thing?
> 
> Hi Ed..I know now that I could have done it this way..I have never encountered a
> piano that was that flat before and all sorts of bad structural things were going
> through my moind!..i played it ultra-conservative, which is NOT my nature..!
> 
> >  I have
> > raised a piano 300 cents in 2 hours, and it sounded fine.  There was a lot of
> > stuff that needed cleaning up a month later, but that is the nature of the
> > wire bending in new places, ( which it will be doing because of the amount of
> > movement required to make this great a change in pitch!).
> 
> In the future, I will handle these major pitch raises in this fashion.
> 
> >
> >  Does this mean that you did 4 tunings, stretched out over a month?
> 
> over 3 months time..i know..ultra-conservative..i know better now..or do I?
> 
> Phil

-- 
Thomas A. Cole, RPT
Santa Cruz, CA
mailto:tcole@cruzio.com