S & S 'D' Problems

[David Skolnik]

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Avery -
Comments are interspersed -

At 12:44 PM 02/03/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>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...
>
>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?

Avery - My first question would have been, "What do you mean by not hitting 
correctly?"   And then, did he raise the entire stack (Bill Garlick hates 
that term), just the front, or the just the back?

>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.

Did the flood affect the hammers enough to swell the felt in that shoulder 
area?

>I checked a few things and found that the dip is well over 10mm on the
>whites,

10mm is almost exact .390".  11mm is .433". Steinway spec for D is .390" 
but manual states that up to .420" is acceptable tolerance for all 
models.  Is "well over 10mm as much as 11mm?

>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.

What effect did the humidity have on action centers and key bushings?

>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.

Steinway D hammer blow spec is 1 7/8".  I am not understanding what would 
prevent you from decreasing dip.  What do you mean about insufficient room 
to lower naturals, and why would you want to?

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

Raising the stack would cause excessive hammer blow if he neglected to 
reestablish the proper hammer line after doing so.

>Any suggestions on what to do to correct the problem(s).

Have you gone back to the dealer yet to thank him for his free help?  Might 
be interesting.  Before you jump in with flippers and air tank, at 1997, 
you are at the tail end of a 5 year warrantee period.  If the technician 
was correct about the hammers not striking correctly (whatever that means), 
and it's not reasonably ascribable to the flood, perhaps the problem was 
there to begin with, and should be covered.

>  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.

Why not?

Best & good luck in a week -

David Skolnik






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