Don writes: I have also drilled up from the bottom with a right-angle drill. No need to use a reverse drill - if the agraffe breaks loose it will spin up nicely. Getting yourself aligned properly is tricky, but doing a careful center punch and using good lights and a mirror on the keybed will help a lot. Rather than trying to center punch from underneath, I think it might be easier and more accurate to use a drill bit that is just slightly undersize in respect to the hole in the plate, and make a dimple in the bottom of the stem. It may damage the threads, but that low in the hole shouldn't matter. I suppose you could grind the cutting edges on the side fluting of the bit so that they wouldn't chew up the plate threads. I once had a badly jammed stem,(previous tech had really botched the job), and found a piece of brass round tubing that was just perfectly sized so that I could put the bit in it and drill into the top of the stem without bothering the threads. Once the bit caught the stem, it quickly spun out through the bottom of the plate and I was thankful that the brass tubing protected the plate threads as the drill klunked down on the plate... Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100915/c78c896f/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC