spinet stickers

[Robert A. Anderson]

I tuned a 1962 Acrosonic spinet today. It has wooden stickers that clip
into the wippens on the bottom, and top pins that slide through a guide
rail. There are cross pieces glued to the stickers that fit over the key
capstans. Some of these cross pieces are turned so that they tend to
hang over the gaps between the capstans. There is no chance of aligning
wippens, keys or capstans to get a reliable alignment. I removed the two
worst ones, and they looked normal, i.e., the alignment of the pin in
the flange of the sticker looked straight, the pin seemed to fit
reasonably snugly into the open birdseye of the wippen, the shank of the
sticker didn't look like it was warped. I switched one of the cockeyed
ones with a straight one. It improved the bad one about 10%. The good
one became about 80% worse.
The only other thing that occurs to me is that the birdseye in the
wippen was not drilled straight. I didn't have time to take the action
out to experiment with the wippens.

Has anyone had a problem like this? And if so, what did you do about it?

Thanks,

Bob Anderson
Tucson, AZ