S & S 'D' Problems

[Avery Todd]

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List,

Warning. This may be a fairly long post. Here's the background.

Our newer 'D' (1997) went back to the dealership for some work. The
extremely high humidity after the flood last summer had affected some
things, mainly the damper system. I had thought about completely
re-regulating it this summer but because the music desk was so tight it
almost took Godzilla to get it out, I decided to wait and see if things
would return to some semblance of normal
after it started drying out. They mostly did, including the music desk
problem. It's fine now.

Anyway, the dealer had heard about us having some problems with the
piano, so he offered to bring it in and have his techs do some work on
it before the festival at no charge to us. Hey, why not? :-) Freed me
up to do other things.

I've talked to the shop tech and he told me that he'd had to raise the
stack some because the hammers weren't hitting correctly. My first
question is what effect would that have to how the action would then
have to be regulated?

OK, now the problems. I had to pull the action Saturday to do something
or other and accidently discovered that a lot of the hammers are now
resting on the backchecks. Even to the point of being able to hear a
noise when they hit and there's no bounce at all on many of them.
Especially from the upper middle, all the way down to the end. Also, if
you put your hand on the hammer and slowly press the key, you can feel a
slight rub on many of them in that area. And no, it's not the tail 
that's rubbing. :-) If the hammer should happen to come back too 
hard, it could
cause it to be caught by the backcheck. That happened on one note with
Angela Chang (Janina Fialkowska's substitute). I corrected a few by
changing the angle of the backcheck just a little and got through the
concert OK.

I checked a few things and found that the dip is well over 10mm on the
whites, the hammer blow is at least 2", the drop is way too much and
there is plenty of aftertouch, in not too much in some cases. However
the basic feel is fairly decent, maybe even on the light side. Almost 
"dangerously light", as Anton put it.

If I raise the hammer line to where I normally like to have it (around
1 3/4" or so, that's going to seriously increase the aftertouch. Even
raising it to 1 7/8" would cause a problem and I don't think I can
decrease the dip enough to compensate for that. There's also not enough
room to be able to lower the whites any. They're already about as low as
they can be.

That brings me back to my first question. Would raising the stack have
made these compromises necessary? Especially the excessive hammer blow?

Any suggestions on what to do to correct the problem(s). I haven't had
a chance yet to check the backcheck height in relation to letoff. That's
one possibility but I'm not quite ready to jump in and start lowering 
backchecks just yet, until I know what's really happening here. The
problem was not there before the tech raised the stack.

Got any comments Horace? Anyone else? I'm going to have to get on it
this week, so any quick help would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry about the length of this. It just takes a bit to explain all this.
I'm also going to send this to the caut list, so sorry about any
duplication for some of you.

Regards,
Avery

P.S. At least they corrected some of the problems with the damper lift,
even though I don't really like the damping, either.
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