Israel Stein wrote: > I don't believe that Ron Nossaman - who was the first to express the > opinion here that lined up beckets don't matter - can hardly be accused > of "rarely doing the best work". Ah, understanding. It's not a binary thing, as these discussions typically revert to instantly. Beckets that are not precisely (perfectly) aligned aren't therefor sloppy, nor are they necessarily random or indicative of lack of knowledge, skill, or care elsewhere. Of what functional difference is a pin with a becket pointing 10° off from it's neighbor? None that anyone can detect other than visually. If that qualifies as sloppy and uncaring, there are only three pianos per year in the world being competently and caringly rebuilt, likely by accident. I, shockingly enough, do actually make an attempt to keep the beckets in reasonable alignment (photo of what's in the shop now), but I consider insistence of absolute perfection in something as functionally meaningless as this to be a waste of energy when there are so very many things we can be working to improve that do matter. If the photo is of a sloppy job, then I'm sloppy. >And when rebuilding pianos in an > institutional setting on salary one must always engage in triage, due to > constraints on time and resources, pay attention to things that affect > function and sometimes forget about one's "pride". It's a bit different for an independent. We don't have time to waste either, as the pay is tied to the job rather than the calendar. Still, there are too many times when we spend much longer doing a fixed pay job than we intended, just because we aren't satisfied with the outcome. Each job that goes out represents us to entirely different people in totally uncontrolled ways. > Obsessing over insignificant details may sometimes > prevent one from paying attention to significant ones, especially in > time-sensitive situations. This is, of course, the point. Ron N -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: beckets.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 73150 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20091002/2fa69285/attachment-0001.jpg>
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