Fred, I am sure you are absolutely correct when you say the makers must have believed in the designs of their actions. I feel that there were many ideas which never really came to fruition before they were supplanted by newer ones, and I think that some could be revisited. If, as was often the case, they were too costly to sustain, or the materials they were made of were scarce, modern production methods and synthetic materials might offset this, and further development might be possible too. Of course, I don't expect it to ever happen! Though there is WNG. who prove the point. As for more on the early pianos, it is interesting to speculate on the repair techniques of years ago, some of which have faded into history. For instance, in most of these instruments, only the hammers had centerpins, almost always a long wire clamped between two continuous brass flange rails.. The flanges and levers were pointed and joined by a vellum hinge inserted into a fine saw kerf in each part. Vellum and parchment are more or less interchangeable terms, vellum being the preferred term for the best quality. The vellum would last for decades, then suddenly break. How would one repair this? We did know, but I will let everyone see if they can propound solutions, then I will tell. The methods are probably still alive in the museums. To come back to the Erards, the hammershanks of the earliest pianos were not glued into holes in the hammer heads. On one end of the shank were instead two prongs which fitted into grooves on both sides of the hammer moldings. This was fine, as the straight stringing only required hammer bores to be zero degrees throughout. The prongs were long enough to leave an opening for the check wire to protrude. This latter impinged on a piece of leather on the front ot the molding.and was fastened in the wippen lever so that it moved toward the hammer when played. We referred to this type of hammer shank as double forked shanks, as the other end had the usual prongs which held the bushings. My customer's piano, on the other hand was essentially modern and overstrung. so the hammershanks were made with a round end ,but still had a rectangular opening for the check wire.The owner, an engineer originally from Australia, had lived in England for a while, and someone had done a very nice job of refelting the hammers. This is a service now performed only by Abel in Germany, to the best of my knowledge. Ironically, they use an original Alfred Dolge hammer press exclusively for such work, which they scouted the USA for, as their regular hammer presses could not work for this job. Incidentally, there is a Dolge press in Montreal. A nice picture of it is in Andre Orebeek's book, 'The Voice if the Piano' and one is also in Dolges' 'Pianos and their Makers'. There was, and perhaps still is, one outside of the Ronson hammers establishment, rusting into oblivion. It had come from D. M/ Best, a Toronto piano supply company, now defunct. I remember when they had sixteen of them, and scrapped most of them, retaining only two, which they fitted with heating coils so that the hammers could be removed after fifteen minutes. Before World War ll this company had made excellent hammers with Weickert felt. The newer hammers were very poor. There was a real opportunity missed for somebody to set up a hammer recovering service. I was unaware of when this all accured, or would have tried to acquire one of the presses. Ted Sambell ________________________________ From: Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu> To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Wed, November 17, 2010 2:50:51 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] Baldwin D bridge On Nov 17, 2010, at 9:46 AM, Edward Sambell wrote: I could have a good deal more to say on these early instruments, but I hope you find this of some interest. Your descriptions were fascinating, and I'd be very interested in more. Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101117/f6f309f7/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC