[pianotech] Drilled capo bars

[John Ross]

The Heintzman pianos from Canada had such a system, they called it the agraffe bridge, patented, I think in 1896.
They continued to use the system, till their demise in the 1970's.
It was only in their high end uprights, as the entry level pianos still just had the bar.
John Ross
Windsor, Nova Scotia
On 2011-03-10, at 3:17 PM, John Delacour wrote:

> At 11:24 -0600 10/03/2011, Daniel Carlton wrote:
> 
> 
>> Anyone care to say anything about drilled capo bars? Has anyone besides manufacturers tried this, and had success or not? How exactly is it supposed to contribute to "exceptionally long sustain?" By removing mass from the bar/giving the bar more freedom to vibrate? I'm not an engineer...
> 
> The whole idea of a capo bar is that it should be massive and immovable.  This mass and immovability is critical in the extreme treble, where many makers do use a cast-in front bridge (capo). Makers who use agraffes almost always used a special more massive agraffe for the top two sections and good results can be had with those.  The bar has several advantages over the agraffe but in all cases is far more massive than it needs to be to perform its function, simply because it's convenient to cast it that way. Drilling holes in it ( and I've never seen or hear of such a thing) is not going to  reduce the mass to anywhere near the critical level and is not going to make a scrap of difference to the function of the bridge as a massive immovable termination that absorbs no energy from the string.   Perhaps they think it looks pretty.
> 
> JD
> 

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