Thanks Vladan. Its pretty basic grunt work, tho there are a few pitfalls. One starts low on the shoulder with three needles at 6.5 mm... 7 if you are good at not breaking needles, and start deep needling up towards the crown. Typcially the first round of needling will be around 35-40 jabs each shoulder. These need to be evenly distributed from the lower shoulder area up to within around 2 mm of the crown. As you move upwards you adjust your angle so as to never needle deep under the crown itself. At the highest point you are almost needling straight down. In class they made us draw pencil lines 1 mm behind the midpoint of the crown, and 2 mm in front of it for all 88 hammers to help keep an eye on the <<forbidden zone>>. After the first needling is done, the action is put into the piano and played to get an idea of how much more is needed. They are after a nice fat sound with lots of sustain for the fundemental tone. That is accomplished by finding the right balance of lower shoulder needling which gives power, and upper shoulder needling which subtracts from that initial explosion of sound. Noise caused by string mating problems or too hard a crown area are dealt with in the final voicing phase. Depending on the hammers you get, sometimes you end up with 60 or more deep jabs before you do the first reshaping. That is done with very rough emory cloth. When shaping is finished the action placed back into the piano and they start the final voicing phase. First is making sure there is enough deep needling done, and making sure it is very even over all registers. Then string mating is checked and any neccessary filing done. Remaining noise is removed by very shallow needling (i.e. 1 - 1.5 mm deep) on and around the crown area. This is mostly single string needling. This is followed by a fine finish to the reshaping, they use 180 grade emory. From this point on they dont deep needle on the front side of the hammer. Any and all deep needling is done behind the crown. A day of rest, and then the whole thing is checked once more and corrected as needed. Cheers RicB V T wrote: >Welcome back, Ric. Can you describe the procedure >they use to loosen up the hammers? > >Vladan > >=============== > > >
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