Terry Before doing anything drastic, I would measure the height of the wippen cushions on your Tokiwas wips and compare it with the height of a S&S wip cushion. I agree with David that the ones you have are too tall, and cutting off a 1/4" or even 3/8" of felt is not against the "rules", and would be much easier than reboring the hammers. Willem (Wim) Blees, RPT Piano Tuner/Technician Mililani, Oahu, HI 808-349-2943 Author of: The Business of Piano Tuning available from Potter Press www.pianotuning.com -----Original Message----- From: pianolover 88 <pianolover88 at hotmail.com> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Fri, Jul 24, 2009 11:07 am Subject: [pianotech] Steinway L rebuild question Hello all, I'm rebuilding a Steinway L, circa 1962, and I just finished replacing all the wipps, hammers, shanks, flanges. All these parts are Tokiwa, and I must say I'm pretty happy with the quality and fit. For the hammers I went with abel encore naturals, since I've used these before on S&S and was very pleased, I did the same here. My question has to do with regulating strike distance to 1 3/4". As we know, many pianos have an adjustable rebound rail. We also know that Steinway does NOT. Each rebound cushion is part of the wippen, and does not have a separate up/down adjustment. The reason I bring this up, is that now with all new action parts in place, I find that I must lower the hammers all the way down, firmly resting on the cushions, but that still only yields about 1.5" strike distance. I di d bench regulate about a half an octave just to see how it responded at the shortened SD, and it seemed perfectly fine, but I'd like to get it to proper specs. I realize that new parts need breaking in, and the new knuckles will also compress. I tried compressing a few of the cushions by pressing down on them for about 10 seconds, and that put me almost to 1 3/4", but they will likely puff up again. So I placed a box of jiffy weights along the tops (see pic) of a few of them, and if I leave for a day or so, do you think this will compress them enough to allow for proper strike distance, and possible even enough to actually get the shanks at least a bit off the cushions? Or is this not a good idea? Thanks in advance for any help on this issue. Cheers! Terry Peterson Accurate Piano Service UniGeezer.com "Over 50, and not "2" Tired!" Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Store, access, and share your photos. See how. = -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090724/67d34e52/attachment.htm>
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