Zeno, Been down that road myself on a school piano. My gut feeling is that if something catastrophic were to happen you would know by now. The rust will eventually result in premature string breakage but it may be primarily a cosmetic issue. If the budget is there you could recommend restringing the offended area and take that opportunity to clean the plate up or just wait it out and replace strings as neccessary. If breakage happened in bunches then restringing the section (or entire piano ) would be the best recommendation, but with budgets as they are it might be a tough sell for a piano that isn't symptomatic. Just my take. Tom Driscoll Subject: [pianotech] waterproof plate bushings Just wanted to get a couple of opinions: A nice Kawai RX-2, about 14-15 years old, which must have done something really bad in a past life, because now it's been condemned to a high school auditorium. A few years back someone spilled some sort of sugary drink all over the tuning pin area, and I've been asked to do something about it. The interesting thing is that it's not in bad shape all things considering. There's a sticky mess all over the plate in the tuning pin area. The strings are not rusty except for some tuning pin coils. The agraffes look pretty nasty, but again, the strings don't show any rust. The tuning pins feel ok, and the bottom of the pinblock is clean. It seems like the plate bushings prevented the spill from going straight into the pinblock. (are they using waterproof plate bushings?) Also, the action is fine. How long would it take for pinblock contamination to manifest? It's been 3-4 years since the spill. Seems like all that's needed is a cleaning, and replacing a bunch of strings. -Zeno Wood, NYC -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091119/e8e257e0/attachment.htm>
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