Stieff bridge-like thingee

[David Love]

If you mean the bass bearing bar, I recently had to replace one of these.
It was, however, attached to the open faced pinblock.  I removed the bar
(chisel), pulled the pins and made a template from Mylar and indexed the
first and last hole to a point in the piano so I could relocate it back to
it's original position.  Then I sent off to Pianotek to have the piece rough
duplicated out of a piece of pinblock scrap.  Had I had a piece of scrap big
enough, I could have made it myself.  I had them pay special attention to
the thickness.  When I got it back I did the rest of the shaping with a
sander, drilled the holes from the template, repinned, cut the bevel and
relocated the piece back in the piano with the index markings.  It worked
fine.

David Love


----- Original Message -----
From: <Tvak@AOL.COM>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: August 10, 2002 11:46 AM
Subject: Stieff bridge-like thingee


OK, I'm still working on the Stieff upright.  I hope it doesn't become as
infamous on this list as Stephen Airy's Ricca & Sons, but as things come up,
I do appreciate any input.  So...

The bass has a bridge-like thingee on the tuning pin end of the string
instead of agraffes or those little pins that stick out of the plate.  It's
made of wood and has bridge pins.  It's not mounted to the sound board
though.   Anyway, there are cracks in it just like in a real bridge, due to
the bridge pins moving to the side so that they are nearly in contact with
one another.  Needless to say, the tone in this area (wound tri-chords)
suffers.

Let me clarify that.  The pin farthest to the right as you face it is fine
and could be left alone.  The other two, however, have drifted towards the
right pin so that all three are in a little row next to each other, nearly
touching, leaving an open groove from their original position to where they
are now.

I need to move the pins over so they are separated again, to where they
originally were, but there's not really any wood there, just a groove where
the pins used to sit.  Without replacing the whole bridge-thingee (I
wouldn't
know where to begin...) do you think I could just set the pins in epoxy?
Would the epoxy hold the pin well enough to be a good termination point for
the string?  I mean, there wouldn't really be much wood where the pins would
be.  I would just fill the groove with epoxy, let it harden just a bit, and
then insert the pins where they ought to be.

Seems like it would work, but I thought I'd ask.  Wim, you've done alot of
bridge work.  What do you think?

Tom Sivak