Ted- F2 on the D is a special case. The damper guide rail hole is at a nodal point of the string. Because of this it allows more lateral rotating movement of the damper head. (Detune one of the unisons, and damping is improved.) Your result supports Ron's claim that a weighted damper head improves lateral damping. Ed S. ----- Original Message ----- From: Edward Sambell To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2010 12:48 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] damper touch weight - head-weight preference? Back in 1973 I did weight the damper heads on Anton Keurti's Hamburg Steinway D. It was my first acquaintance with him, and the circumstances make for a fairly long story, if you can bear with me. He had brought the piano from Toronto to here (London, Ontario) for a concert he was performing a week later. He asked me to replace all the wedge and singles damper felt, which he brought with him, sans the red backing. This came from Germany, and I was glad of that, as the agraffe holes were wider spaced than are New York Steinways, and most felts not specific to these would have been a real problem. A few bass felts had been replaced with some coarse hairy stuff, and a sizable hex nut was glued on top of one damper head. He ranted about the slow damping on F2, the bottom tenor note. This damper is short of course . He said that every D he played had the same problem and that it was lousy design. Although he did not complain about it, I found the singles to also damp slowly. After replacing all the felts including red backing from my own stock I re-installed the dampers. Result? No improvement whatever. I suppose I could have simply said I did what I could and that's the way the piano is, but it so happened I had a gunsmith's lead furnace I had acquired, not to make bullets , but to experiment with key leading. The Hamburg Steinway does not use damper lever springs, and the levers were already fully loaded with leads, so I decided to pour molten lead into two holes in each damper head, one on either side of the wire.. I duly bored the holes, 3/16" dia. and not right through and did the pouring, a tricky job.. When cooled I spread the lead with an improvised punch. There was no visible scorching of the wood, and the added weight was under 2 grams. The effect on the touch was undetectable.The evening of the concert, Anton arrived. He glared at me and marched up to the piano, I knew what he was going to do, and he did. He gave the F2 a big thump, stacatto. It damped! Perfectly. Anton said not a word, but gave me two of his LP's after the concert. I have lost count of the number of times I have prepared pianos for his performances over the years and we have becomes good friends. But this was the only time I ever weighted damper heads. Ted Sambell ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Ron Nossaman <rnossaman at cox.net> To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Thu, December 23, 2010 8:44:23 AM Subject: Re: [CAUT] damper touch weight - head-weight preference? On 12/20/2010 9:28 AM, Ron Nossaman wrote: > On 12/20/2010 9:19 AM, David Skolnik wrote: >> Thanks Rn, I'll buy it, though I do wonder about the inertial effects of >> having that weight at the end of that wire. In theory, that 'compliance' >> you speak of could be exacerbated (yea, I know) by the increased >> resistance of the head weight. > > That's the point. > > Ron N > Sorry, I got sidetracked and didn't finish this. As to damping, putting the mass in the head minimizes compliance between the damper mass and the string. It's a more direct coupling than with the mass in the under lever. It may be a problem in the power stroke if the mass is high, guide bushing loose, or wire bends extreme, but for damping, it's ideal. Ron N -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101223/1f966863/attachment.htm>
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