What's all this I hear about Inertia ?

[Richard Brekne]

Greetings.

    On assist springs, I think they can make a bad action better by
    allowing the removal of excess key lead, not the right way to fix
    things. But, fooling around with these things I was able to 'feel'
    the same action with different amounts of key lead, . An old 550
    Kawai had a nice action until I unhooked the assist springs and
    added lead.
    Fenton

Curious as to how you got  "an action with the same hammers, ratio, and 
BW, but different leading".  If you change the leading, then you change 
the BW.  That is to say unless you changed the leading but kept the FW 
constant.

This said.  Several of these posts seem to skirt the main issue involved 
here, namely that if your hammer strike weight is too high for your 
ratio, then the action is simply going to feel heavy in some sense or 
another no matter what you do. Assist springs wont really change that 
under play nearly as much as some will have it. Indeed, I've gotten to 
the point where instead of feeling like I need some kind of assist 
mechanism to tweek or fine tune BW, I'd rather use a basic stanwood 
approach and add a diagnostic to tweek the ratio key to key for more 
uniform touch.  Then too is the point that adjustable touch weight 
schemes in the end address the static side of the equation more then the 
dynamic. To what degree is another discussion.

Cheers
RicB