Hi, Israel You know, "well enough" is the operative term there. We all have encountered grand actions which are very noisy, especially once most of the friction has departed from wear. The standard grand action seems almost designed to transmit and amplify small sounds. Apparently this AB Chase action suffers from none of that. If it was a tradeoff between cheaper manufacturing and quiet long-lasting actions, it's too bad that cheapness won. Since there probably aren't too many of these actions left, I hope rebuilders will be willing to take the time to restore these parts instead of trading them out. They do seem superior to the standard wippens and shanks which would replace them. Susan Kline On 11/28/2010 7:18 AM, Israel Stein wrote: > On 11:59 AM, Susan Kline wrote: >> Too bad that design did not become standard. Too expensive to >> manufacture, no doubt. >> >> Susan > If you examine old action designs, you'll find that the "intermediate > lever" between the jack and the shank is a design feature that comes > and goes in piano action design history. It was first used by > Cristofori... Eventually it dropped out of earlier action design, and > we ended up with the single-escapement so-called "English Action" as > the standard design (everywhere but where the Viennese action became > the vogue), in which the jack acts directly on the shank - the sort of > action you find in square pianos. So it is not surprising that someone > tried this "intermediate lever" feature on the double-escapement > action. And it did not catch on this time probably for the same reason > that it didn't survive in the earlier designs - the action functions > well enough without it... > > Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101128/54f1d398/attachment.htm>
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