Tightening coils on sloppy restringing

[Roger Jolly]

Hi Garold,
           Sounds as if you have more that coil problems, but since this is
the main question this may help.
#1 Drop the tension enough so that you can use a stringing hook to pull the
coil tight to the becket hole. if there is not enough room to work, an old
heavy unicord bass string with a hook fasioned from the core wire works
very well.
#2 Bring to tension.
#3 Use a very 'blunt screw driver to tap the coils tight from above, Jim
Bryant had a drawing of the best coil tightener that I have seen (and used)
in the tech tips colum of the Journal some time back. Many of the bad coils
that we see is from over pulling or leveraging the coils.
#4 Once the coils are in better shape. Support the pin block with jacks and
tap coils to 1/8" from the plate. This MAY take care of the tuning
stability problem. A word of caution, the previous sloppy tech may have
used 2 1/2" pins, I believe the model O had 2 1/4" pins. As a practice when
I encounter this kind of workmanship I will pull a couple of pins and
check, as well as try to assertain the length of the original. Some pianos
that were designed for 2 1/2" Pins will exibit questionable tuning
stability in a short period of time if 2 1/4" over size pins are used.
Using longer pins with out pin block support will almost always push out
the bottom layer of the pin block. This may be where some of your action
problems are coming from.
Hope this helps
Roger




At 11:08 AM 5/1/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I recently inspected a Steinway O that had been "rebuilt" a couple of
years ago in another state. The wire protrudes through the pins about
!/8"+, pins lean back at 8 degrees (guessing) and the wire spirals down the
pin, some with 4-5 turns, to end at pretty much plate level. If the coils
were tight the pins would be a good 1/4" too high. My problem; the coil
lifting tools I possess are difficult to impossible to get in position with
access limited by adjacent pins (when I restring I tighten coils as I go
and put on enough tension to keep them in place). Does anyone know if there
a tool available that would make this easier or have any ideas on how to
efficiently tighten these coils and tap the pins down to make piano
tunable? (The pins that I tried are almost too loose so I'm not worried
about ending up too torqued). This is only the beginning of problems with
this piano (example-I couldn't get the action out because the hammer flange
screws were jammed into the lowered pinblock) but if any one has any
suggestions on improving the coil situation I would appreciate your input.
>
>Garold Beyer 
>
>Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Tighteni.htm"
>
Roger Jolly
Balwin Yamaha Piano Centres.
Saskatoon/Regina.
Canada.