Re voicing hammers

[Erwinspiano@aol.com]

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Ric
  A well reasoned & dispassioante post I  wholeheartedly agree with. 
   I keep saying it ,but if a hammer that  requires only a little stiffening 
up, speaking from starting on the soft  side,  doesn't require thick but only 
very thin dilutions of  nitro cellulose lacquer to coat the fibers & stiffen 
the hammer. This mild  treatment does not render the fibers unresielent nor 
ruined but regulates  the resilience of the fiber
    The truly soft   hammer requires denser & multiple  lacquer solutions. If 
it  takes this technique  to get it speak  then the felt is poor or  pressed 
wrong or both. & I'll let you'all draw your own conclusions on  that one.  
However they can sound great...... for a while & I  beleive in the end, possibly 
harder to manage. That being said I've worked on  hammers like  this that were 
quite mangeable.     
    Ray at Ronsen pointed out the one brand of  felt has good tensioning 
qualities but not much compression. A great felt has  both. SO the lacquer is 
adding an artificial component of compression.....,IMO  that is.
  Also in this only a little bit soft case, straight  acetone washed into the 
hammer can have a mild stiffening affect by shrinkage  & leaves no residue. 
Certainly a harmless first step . A Rule of thumb  in voicing is always use the 
least innocuos step first & do test  notes.
  Dale Erwin
   

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 lacquer 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 doping).

That said.. Stan wood has observed that lacquers  and other hardening 
agents tend to coat the fibers of hammer felt making  them brittle and 
essentially destroying their resilient capabilities. So a  chemical that 
simply causes the fibers to tension up a  bit...(shrinking)  without any 
other affect would perhaps be the  ideal.  Haven't tried any such thing 
yet... shying from chemicals as  I do, thou I have bumped into a bit of 
reading on the subject.

As  for colloduium .... grin... you are wrong about its primary benefit 
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 maintenance done.

Cheers
RicB





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