[CAUT] Rinsing lacquer from hammers

[David Love]

A tech from this area (Roy Foreman) had a procedure of adding hardener to
hammers which involved first dipping the hammers into a lacquer bath and
then putting them on a centrifuge of sorts which spun the excess liquid out
of the hammer.  It left the hammers some more dense but still with some
resilience and they never really got to that point where you couldn't
penetrate the hammer with needles.  I don't know what strength solution he
used but it worked fairly well.  Given the structure of the fibers that we
see here in these various photographs one wonders whether this method tended
to leave the bulk of the solids content within the fiber and remove the
residual content that might collect outside the fibers.  BTW he tended to
use Ronsen Bacon felt hammers almost exclusively for this procedure, as I
recall, but perhaps Ray can comment if he's reading this.  I know they were
definitely Ronsen though this was some time ago and I'm not sure what felt
was being used at that time.  

 

David Love

www.davidlovepianos.com

 

From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Fred
Sturm
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 6:26 PM
To: caut at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [CAUT] Rinsing lacquer from hammers

 

On Feb 14, 2011, at 7:04 PM, David Love wrote:





It's easy to imagine that the lacquer my both get absorbed into the interior
of the outer tube and also coat the exterior of the tube.  Soaking the
hammers in thinner for purposes of extraction might well float the lacquer
off the exterior of the fibers but might do less well extracting it from the
interior.  That would concur with some people's experience (as Dell said he
experienced) that soaking might improves things somewhat but it's not quite
like starting over with a fresh, unadulterated piece of felt. 

 

            I certainly don't disagree. The residual lacquer could be bits
still left on the surface, or it could be that some of the nitrocellulose
penetrates the fibers themselves. I suspect an electromicrograph of treated
fibers wouldn't answer the question, though it might show what happens on
the surface. 

            If it penetrates the fibers themselves, it stiffens them from
within, rather than just providing a hard and rather brittle coating. Some
interesting food for thought, in trying to visualize what is happening when
you add hardeners, and when you insert needles into lacquered felt. In
either case, the effect is that of making a material that is less dense act
similar to one that is more dense, by stiffening its fibers. Up to a point,
at least, because when too much material is added, it seems to fill in the
gaps between the fibers and create an amalgam that needles can't penetrate.
With more mildly treated hammers, the needle goes in readily and seems to
"crunch" the fibers apart (it feels and sort of sounds like something glassy
coating the fibers is breaking, but it could be crystals within the fibers
being shattered).

Regards,

Fred Sturm

fssturm at unm.edu

"Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them." Coco Chanel

 

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