At 11:44 PM +0000 12/11/01, Phillip L Ford wrote: > > I rebuild pianos with agraffes and design them without. > >If you don't mind me asking, how do you terminate the strings in your design? You can ask, but until the prototype is completed I won't say, mainly because I may come across snags rather than owing to any creative genius. > >> This belongs up on the museum shelf right next to the process of >>>putting little pieces of paper under the keys to level them. >> >>...the need for which practice is also eliminated in my keyboard design. > >Now that I would like to see. This invention is also something I don't want to disclose at the moment, though it's an idea I would probably find at the patent office if I looked hard enough because it's hard to think that nobody else has ever thought of it. It's amazing what you come across at the Patent Office if you're prepared to spend the time having the stuff brought up from the vaults. I was there a couple of weeks ago looking up various things and was particularly interested to see Stodart's patent for the Grand Action, which is the predecessor of all English actions. It's also the first time the word Grand was used for the pianoforte. The 1886 facsimile of this patent has big drawings and a hand-written claim. In those days, inventors received their patent at a personal audience with the king (George iii, of American fame). The patent is also written in English, which is unheard of nowadays! >Yes, you might have a problem in the high treble. I wasn't >considering agraffes >all the way to the top. I guess this would make it Teutonic engineering since >we don't normally see that on American pianos. Yes, quite a few German and English grands, notably Bechstein, have agraffes to the top. Bechstein, Chappell and most others have the heavy canted agraffe right at the top but others use the light type all the way up (as Del said he did recently). My 1860 Kirkman straight-strung, by contrast, uses the heavy agraffe all the way through. I think agraffes must at one time have been an important selling point signifying a piano of high quality, whether upright or grand. However many uprights of very high quality use a pressure bar and cast-in or rodded top bridge and I've come across plenty of cheap grands with a cast-in top bridge all the way through which, if they weren't great pianos, certainly would have been no greater for the use of agraffes and quite possibly worse. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe that the agraffe has any superlative merit per se. JD
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