Two felts better than one? / was: Andre's Front Punchings

[John Delacour]

At 09:20 -0800 6/2/08, Jurgen Goering wrote:

>However, I am getting increasing requests for the same thing for the 
>back rail.  Many pianos had a thin felt strip (1.5 - 2 mm) 
>underneath the back rail cloth.  It appears that 2 mm of felt under 
>5 mm of cloth is more quiet than one 7 mm strip of cloth.
>
>Can anyone corroborate this?

Standard back-touch baize, as used by Steinway, is very firm and the 
firmer the back-touch the noisier it will be.  A soft felt underlay 
will cetainly make it slightly quieter but you'll still get the slap 
of the key against the top surface.  High class German pianos in the 
old days used about 5 strips of a special fulled cloth, usually 
white, about an inch wide in a "tunnel" of thin box-cloth.  So far as 
I know this special cloth is no longer available, though Danielsen in 
Denmark used to sell a pale blue material they called "Molton", which 
is the Danish for Melton, that served the purpose well.  However it 
is nothing like Melton or molleton but rather a very soft fairly 
open-textured fulled cloth.  I see they still list it (in white) Cat. 
No. 1253.

<http://www.knud-danielsen.dk/catalougepianoparts/CATALBAIZE.html>

Incidentally Kirkman always used two front punchings, a medium-hard 
baize of about 5mm topped with a green box-cloth punching of about 
2.5mm.

JD