Hi Dale We agree once more :) I can echo your experience concerning older Bossies, and some Bluthners and scattered this and thats. Leather seems to have gotten a largely undeserved bad rap. Perhaps this is due to the probability that appropriate lubrication for the application was either lacking or far too scantily applied back through time. I aggree with David Stanwood that leather has a tendancy to get sluggish if not kept slick. Teflon powder is my choice for sure. With felt I like to soak with Protek. Leather wears much better to be sure but then on the other hand if too eagerly sized it gets a bit noisy. All in all tho.. in high use situations that allow for reasonably frequent service visits, I would choose a good leather hands down Cheers RicB Davids & Terry my limited exposure to leather is that it holds up for a very long time & seeing that many of our performance pianos turn a new set of nicely fit bushings to a sloppy fit in about a years time leaves me frustrated. So Trix & I are currently finding leather supply & tehcs to work with it to see if this will alleviate this problem. Imho It simply isn't practical to replace a set of keybushings every year or so. I've seen many older Bosy's & Euro pianos with bushing at least 100 years old that were fit right up to a new type tolerance of a few thous. Really amazing. I remember that Joel & Pris Rapport used a lot of leather bushings as well. Occasional lubrication would be easy & preferrable to many sets of bushings & continual sloppy keys Dale My 2cents... Leather has a very high coefficient friction and leather bushing are an absolute disaster unless are liberally treated with microfine teflon powder. Without dry lube the key plays a lot harder with a sideways glancing stroke and the bushings wear out and start to get noisy very quickly.... the same goes for cloth bushings but it is not as critical as with leather... You can test this easily by putting a little side pressure on the front key pin as you move the key up and down.... It takes a lot more force to move the key with a little side pressure if the bushing has not been treated with dry lube... David Stanwood
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