Israel Totaly get all that! regards Dale Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:10:00 -0500 erwinspiano at aol.com wrote: Hi Al, David, Israel & and all Having re strung lots of pianos it seems no matter how good the original block seems to be the re strung results are never as good as a new block. By this I mean going from the original no. 2 to a no. 3. I'm not saying it's not doable or casting dispertion as our shop restrings some old blocks on occasions like any of us. Ok,I've tried reaming,gun barrel brushes etc.,even tried spoon bits. What are they for anyway? So the point is, the end result of the restring for me are never quite as good as a new block and sometimes frustratingly ...well,frustrating to tune. I'm getting to the point where if its a really good piano a new block isn't usually going to break the bank. SO... Like Nike, Just do it? Well, it's like this. When you have about a dozen Steinway grands at San Francisco State University that wear out a set of strings every 10 years or so - there is no way I am going to convince anyone to ship the pianos out for pinblocks every time they need a set of strings. And there is no way anyone is going to allot either the space or a budget to set up a shop and equipment to do pinblocks in-house. Especially since the Governator shoved a 20% across-the-board budget cut down the throat of the California State University (of which we are one of 33 campuses) on top of about ten years of previous budget cuts that resulted in wholesale faculty layoffs, shutting down of whole departments and no Spring 2010 admissions. The short answer is - you can't spend money that you don't have. Hell, it was nothing short of a miracle that I was able to convince the Director to spring for two sets of bass strings and ancillary parts/supplies to restring two Steinway M's that were long overdue for new strings. Who knows how long the University would even be able to continue paying Margie's and my half-time salaries (more cuts coming next year) so that those pianos at least get routine maintenance and whatever "rebuilding" we can do in-house. We are down to reconditioning old wippens donated by a local rebuilding house to replace the worn out teflon-era wippens that we still have in some of these pianos. I hope the taxpayers of California are happy... As for your other questions, I'll let others answer them... Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091129/ca0c65d5/attachment.htm>
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