[pianotech] Kawai parts follow up

[David Renaud]

If I had found this, the first thing I would do - before fixing - would be to call Kawai.
dp
David M. Porritt, RPT
dporritt at smu.edu
------------------------------------------------------

.......Yes, your right....I should reveal what I did first while thinking about how to proceed ..... here was my immediate response.


     Fist when I found this, on site, I called a peer I respect with more experience. He had also seen something similar and did call kawi. He was told by Kawi that the key bushings were likely getting loose and that was causing  stress on the flanges and in turn causing the birds eyes to enlarge.  He did not get anywhere on dealing with this issue. That left
me both because of this and a former experience wanting to get more
information and support before calling Kawi.
    
    Secondly, I tried to see if we could get the dealer to call Kawi
as that would might have more weight. The client purchased the piano
out of town from Montreal, not from the local Kawai dealer. The piano
dealer, because she from another distant city shopping for a better price
they gave her the better price, but with limits on follow up service and
responsibility. The client did not want me following up with the dealer.

   Thirdly, I determined that I want to talk to Kawai myself, but only after gathering more feedback.
  I don't want to be told with some authority that this is the key bushings fault or some other silly excuse for a young piano requiring #22.5 pins.
I was hoping there would be some common experience dealing with this.
There are relatively new parts and perhaps now finally enough people have shared this experience for it to be taken seriously. I would like to go to
kawi with a expectation that this is an anomaly, or that there is a real problem to address here. 

   A fourth  footnote is I did deal with Kawi once on a grand action 
problem and action parts. Very low friction in flanges is desired by them.
This was making problems as it leaves very little margin for error. They approved repining hammer flanges. I did, an although the piano was better
this advanced Russian concert artist thought it still needed more. This was followed up by another technician resulted in going yet further
and needing to repin wippen flanges as well. The result was they sent
in there own technician and replaced all the action parts. 

   I left feeling like I was out of the loop insomuch as I never was left
with a sense of what caused the problem, what I should really do about it,
will this be a recurring theme, what was the explanation, and what could
I learn from this. The whole issue of extremely low friction flanges as
policy is other discussion I would like to have............

   This time I want to go to kawi with more assurance of what is wrong and 
what to do about it.

                                   David Renaud






   
 











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