Greetings, << In-piano regulation is still the best. >> I agree, to a point. I do virtually all of my regulating at the bench, unless the job is hours away from home. I can do it faster, and, I think, more accurately. While some things must be done at the piano, such as key leveling, final let-off and dip, there are a lot of procedures that are more easily done on a bench. Seems at the factory, the regulators are all working on benches beside the piano. At the piano, after bedding the keyframe to the keybed, the stack must be mated to the keyframe, (this is critical). Then I measure string height, set spring, balancier, blow, and dip on the end keys of each section and take it home. I rarely regulate without polishing capstans, a lot of pinning, and cleaning. After all the pinning is checked and repaired, grubs cleaned, springs polished,(another critical point), it is easy to duplicate the original flex in the frame on the bench because I have the dip set and can easily shim the action to return to the original. It is on the bench that I can most accurately set the jacks, balancier, travel and space,etc. (I have built a jig that copies the string marks from the hammers before I move anything. Then, after all the traveling, burning, pinning, etc. the stack goes back in the jig and the hammers are aligned to the strings. Thanks to Steve Jellen for the idea. The other upside of this is while I am home, I can take my time, catch the occasional call to go tune, etc. I hate deadlines, so I arrange the return several days out. This allows me to keep the action on the bench, letting the work on it fill in any holes in my tuning schedule. This makes for very efficient time usage, on my own terms. I can walk into the shop and begin making my hourly rate in any increment that suits me, from 20 minutes of polishing, to hours of repairs. Regards, Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html <BR><BR><BR>**************<BR>Ideas to please picky eaters. Watch video on AOL Living.<BR> (http://living.aol.com/video/how-to-please-your-picky-eater/rachel-campos-duffy/2050827?NCID=aolcmp00300000002598)</HTML>
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