Hi list, I'm working on a very small Schiedmayer & Sohne grand. Not sure of its age, though it has a queer sort of wippen which makes me think it's pre-1900--based on something I saw in the archives of this list. It had some work done a few (10?) years ago, including new damper felts. The damper heads have an interesting shape, a bit of wood removed near the end so that the very ends of the heads are arched out and separate from the center. Not a great description, sorry I don't have a picture. Looks like a flying buttress on a cathedral. The new damper felts for the plain wire strings are all flat felts (no trichords) and there is not a lot of it there: one piece about a centimeter long at each end of the damper head. The underlevers have no weights but they have a spring which hooks into a loop (the cords are all likely to break if I play with the springs too much--I already broke and replaced two). Also, the owners undertook to move it themselves, and in the process bent the damper wires pretty badly in places. They took the lid off to move it. I spent a long time fixing the bends in the wires and I think I did a reasonable job, except that I couldn't get things looking as nice as I wanted because I had to accomodate the new shape the felt has assumed since it was mashed. I also adjusted the damper timing because they were rather late in the keystroke. Maybe they were set that way to get more pull out of the springs, but you had to push the pedal right to the bottom to get the dampers off the strings. BUT, it's still not damping very well. There aren't any notes which ring particularly worse than others, but it just takes too long for the sound to stop. So I am wondering whether I should replace the damper felts (because they were distorted, though not outright damaged, and because they seem a bit small), try to increase the spring strength, or add some weight to the underlevers? Or something else? I just want the customer to get some noticeable improvement for her money. Thanks in advance for any ideas. Bryn Latta London, Ontario _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live: Keep your friends up to date with what you do online. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9691815 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091108/68f93ed6/attachment.htm>
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