THUD

[Horace Greeley]

Good Morning, John,

Christopher's mention of plate struts calls to mind a phenomenon which I am 
told was mythical...a creation of my mind (as it were):   In the mid-70s, a 
certain well known Eastern piano maker did not experiment with vacuum cast 
plates.  The non-existent 7' pianos from this alleged period had a nasty 
habit of having their plates fail - mostly through the webbing of the first 
treble section, just above the plate strut, and occasionally into the 
capo.  The sound I was not hearing from these instruments in such cases 
often could have been described (had it existed), as a "thud"dy kind of 
sound.  Something between a soundboard which had had something wedged 
between it and the frame and a steel-wound bass string on an older SD or 
SD6 that was about to break.

Not necessarily relevant to what you are facing now, as I think that the 
non-experiment was so sufficiently unsuccessful as to be 
self-limiting.  However, I am not quite sure that I would arbitrarily rule 
out any possibility.  Didn't Holmes say something to Watson about once one 
rules out the things which can be proven not to have occurred that whatever 
is left, no matter how impossible, is where to start looking?  Sorry, it's 
been too long...

I am most curious about what you might find.

Best.

Horace



At 09:35 AM 11/22/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Horace, Roger, Steve,
>         Thank you for the fascinating suggestions.  It will be next week
>before I see C&A 141 again and am anxious to try these approaches.  In the
>meantime can you think of anything else which might apply?
>John Chapman RPT
>Wake Forest University
>Winston-Salem NC