Hi Paul, The recent hammers I've received have been consistently good including the 78 new Steinway grands that arrived here a couple of years ago. Some need more work than others, but they do respond. I use 2:1 for the first juicing or two and 3:1 when they are getting closer. I used to soak them like Ed Foote suggested but now I apply the lacquer directly on the crown and slowly let it soak in until it goes as far in as possible and spreads out from about 10:00 to 2:00. I think this helps keep the shoulders more flexible and puts the hardener where it needs to be. PPP to mf can be re-acquired easily with shallow needling on the crown. The last word I got from the NY factory guys is that they now pre-soak hammers in 3:1 (their mixture, I don't know the solids content) for 30 seconds so whatever you do is on top of that. The main beef I have with NY hammers is that the weight of the hammers varies sometimes quite a bit from set to set. Heavy hammers will need much more hardening than light ones so you might want to look at your strike-weights. Maybe you have a heavy set that is just needing more juicing. One more application might make all the difference. I've had this experience. The hardness and resilience needs to match up to the weight... Eric Eric Wolfley, RPT Director of Piano Services College-Conservatory of Music University of Cincinnati From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Paul T Williams Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 3:57 PM To: caut at ptg.org Cc: Webb, Kent Subject: [CAUT] Bum set of NY hammers, I'm afraid Hi all, How often have you received a bum set of hammers from Steinway NY? I've tried every trick in the book on the Steinway D I've been talking about over the past couple months, but no luck. They just don't want to respond. No charm, character or projection. The regulation is great, string mating is great, ppp is OK, but mf and up just suck! I've put far too many hours voicing one might expect to do with a new set of anything. I suppose 1 set in about 20 I've done isn't bad, but this is a concert piano. I had better luck with our other D with Wally's "special Natural Abel" hammers. The piano faculty is also disappointed in the piano now, and, of course, many recitals to go. I did switch the two pianos out. This one was in our large recital hall and the Wally Steinway was in our small recital hall and too overbearing for a poorly designed room that seats only 250. I've found the Wally's really brighten up a lot after a year or so, so I'll still need to do the 100,000 note "tune up" this summer. We'll see if that calms them down until this summer. Im now thinking of a set of Hamburgs for this problem piano. The D in the Lied Center just got new Hamburgs, and sounds fantastic. Thoughts? I'm really not liking the idea of scrapping these hammers, so if any of you have a last ditch approach, I'd love to hear it! Thanks Paul -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110211/0582aa81/attachment.htm>
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