Bob writes: << Going back to my original question about hammer bore distance affecting the performance of the action, it seems that you are leaning towards other causes of the slow repetition more than the change in bore distance and its impact on knuckle/jack/wippen center relationship. There is a lot of interrelated cause and effect in an action. When you change the bore distance, you are changing the starting position of the hammer shank, and if the knuckle is a different size, you have compounding factors. These dimensions are changing the event timing at escapement and slightly lower than drop, so, without having the action in front of me, I can only draw some general conclusions/confusions. >>One puzzling thing is the comment about Roger Jolly's labeling of aftertouch as anathema to repetition since the key had to travel through it before things can reset. Do you think that .050 aftertouch is beginning to be too much for that reason? >> Way too much. If possible, get your dip and blow related so that you have no more than .035". I have begun setting up Steinway actions with a usual .033" aftertouch and customers are very happy with the response. I have concert actions out there with .025" and .040" and they are considered to be playing very well. I use the aftertouch priority method for several reasons, one of which is that a pianist is far more likely to notice, say, a .010" difference in aftertouch from one note to the next (which represents a 33% difference between it and another note) than they are to notice .010" difference in keydip, which is only a 4% difference between keys. Another reason is that many notes a pianist plays do not start from the top of the keystroke, but rather, are played again before the key is fully released. This makes any difference in keydip, per se, a moot point. Ed Foote RPT www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/ www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html <A HREF="http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/399/six_degrees_of_tonality.html"> MP3.com: Six Degrees of Tonality</A>
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