Broadwood barless grand

[Phillip Ford]

I don't know for sure.  My guess is that it was a cost saving measure.  I think that they wanted to use the same action (and same back action) as on the pianos without barless plates.  Here are a couple of photos of a Broadwood grand without a barless plate:

http://www.vintagepianoshop.com/html/piano48.htm

Notice that the scale is broken into 3 sections on this plate.  It's an interesting point.  They eliminated the intermediate plate struts but didn't take advantage of that to eliminate breaks in the scale, which would seem to be one of the reasons for doing it in the first place.

Phil F

At 01:19 PM 4/16/03 , you wrote:
>What's the reason for the gap in the strings, about an octave below the
>topmost damper?  It looks like a damper's missing (but it's not). 
There's a
>slight jog in the bridge, but no apparent plate strut, and it would seem
>that there would still be trichords on both sides of the gap... so why
the
>jog in the bridge?
>
>--Cy Shuster--
>Rochester, MN