I started the day this morning by replacing an agraffe on a Haines Bros grand from 1912. First the bazaar part: a previous technician in the Madison Wisconsin area (could that have been you Joel???) was very creative. Apparently he had no agraffes for the replacement. This is a low bass string: a single string - note seven I think. The broken agraffe had been removed from the string and the string was reinstalled with no agraffe. That lengthened the speaking length by about an inch, but he also had adjusted the damper to work quite a bit to the side and a lot higher. It did not sound all that bad considering. I would have worried about the string breaking at the higher tension, but it didn't. My question for you is this. If you are going to reuse a bass string, like was best on this piano, how would you do it? Today is the first time I used the old string with no splice when replacing an agraffe. I figured if the Madtown Mechanic could remove it from the string, I should be able to slip one on. (I recall some discussion of washers for agraffes here a while back; I did use five washers to raise the agraffe's hole to be the same height as its neighbors.) After installing the agraffe I tried to get the becket into the agraffe hole. It seemed too difficult, so I removed the agraffe. Then I straightened out the becket so it curved like most of the rest of the tuning pin coil. This made it possible to get the agraffe onto the string. My first attempt with the agraffe installed left clear marks on the soundboard side of the agraffe face, so I knew which way to put the wire through. It was not hard getting the coils through the agraffe. Then I made the small bend in the string bigger where it originally went through the agraffe. This allowed me to turn the agraffe into its hole without hitting the string on everything in its way. Just as I started to put some tension on the string, it broke at the becket. So I turned the string with agraffe back out and started over. The new becket bend was difficult for me to make; thick old wire is not fun to work with. It finally worked out, but it made me wonder how you do it. Would you splice a new length near the tuning pin or would you thread the string onto the new agraffe? Would you install the agraffe first or put the string onto the agraffe first? How do you form a new becket bend with thick old wire? What else am I missing? Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090902/aff6f5c9/attachment-0001.htm>
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