Re voicing hammers

[Ric Brekne]

Hi Andre

My own choice is cellulose lacquer. Its one of the softest, and 
springiest lacquers available. It always struck me that if one first was 
too use lacquer, then a lacqure with its own kind of resiliency was a 
sensible choice. Dries fast, results show themselves in about an hour 
and cures completely in a day or two (at least in the amounts used in 
hammer dopping).

That said.. Stanwood has observed that lacquers and other hardning 
agents tend to coat the fibers of hammer felt making them brittle and 
essentially destroying their resilent capabitlites. So a chemical that 
simply causes the fibers to tension up a bit...(shrinking)  without any 
other affect would perhaps be the ideal.  Havent tried any such thing 
yet... shying from chemicals as I do, tho I have bumped into a bit of 
reading on the subject.

As for collodium .... grin... you are wrong about its primary benifit 
Andre !  In reality that is its ability to make all future use of mind 
expanding drugs totally redundant !! :)

Oh.... and Terry... yep.. some folks are out there hardening Yamaha 
hammers.  Usually because they have been devastated by softening agents, 
over steamed, or just plain needled to death.  Strikes me that in spite 
of all the ingenious alternative methods our American allies have for 
doing things differently... too many over there have forgotten, put 
aside, or otherwise ignored developing and maintaining needling skills.  
No reflection on those who can mind you. One striking difference between 
voicing problems one runs into here in Europe visa vi those in America 
(based on personal experience) is that in America you find tons of cases 
of hammers mauled one way or the other by the uninitiated tech. Where as 
in Europe... the vast majority of voicing problems have their basis 
simply from a lack of voicing maintainance done.

Cheers
RicB




Andre writes:

/My "weapon of choice" is collodium (or collodion) because it is a 
natural hardener, mixed with alcohol and ether.

The ether smells badly for a short time, but the advantage of this 
is that it is easy to apply (with a pipette), easy to take 
along (in a small glass bottle) as a standard tool case item for the 
traveling technician, it will stay the way it is (it does not harden 
out but stays liquid), after 1 hour we get a result and after 1 day the
stuff has done its work completely/