Hi all - You might remember some time ago that I had posted a problem I was having with a Schimmel grand action in which I couldn't get letoff close enough to the strings. I thought somebody might be interested in the resolution. The company FINALLY replied to my many requests for help (after 2 weeks of long distance calls and emails to Germany) and suggested what some of you had also mentioned - that I unscrew the letoff rail from the underside of the hammer rail and plane it down a few mm to raise the letoff buttons higher. However, that was not what I ended up doing for a couple of reasons. First, the letoff rail was in 4 separate sections, and I was concerned that I would not be able to be consistent in the amount of material I took off of them. But more importantly, the threaded metal posts that the dowel letoff buttons screw onto went all the way through the rails, which would mean that I'd have to remove all of them before I could plane the rails down - a huge and tedious job, and I'm not sure the metal posts would be tight enough if I removed and re-installed them. Some of you suggested that I needed to check hammer bore, so I did that and discovered that there was a 9 mm difference between hammer bore and string height (in other words, the shanks were WAY beyond horizontal when the hammers contacted the strings). This seemed to me to point to my original thought that the action brackets were too short, and therefore hammer rail/letoff rails were too low. I used 1/8" aluminum stock to make shims to put between the top of the action bracket and the bottom of the hammer rail, which got the hammer bore closer to string height and also gave me a lot more room to raise the letoff buttons. It worked like a charm - the action regulated perfectly! Schimmel told me that this was not an uncommon problem, and was not specific to Schimmel grands. However, I've never run into anything like this before, and only one other tech who responded to me had ever heard of it either. That person said he remembered the same problem on another Schimmel grand from the same era (1985), and the company had to send replacement action brackets that were taller. For some reason, Schimmel didn't offer that option, so I improvised. I appreciate everybody's input on this problem! Has anybody else had a problem communicating with Schimmel? It was like pulling teeth to get them to respond to me at all. -- Scott A. Helms, RPT Helms Music Enterprises (269) 381-4521 www.helmsmusic.net
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