S & S 'D' Problems - So what happened?

[David Skolnik]

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Avery-
So what happened?

David Skolnik



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. 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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