Delwin D Fandrich Piano Design & Fabrication 620 South Tower Avenue Centralia, Washington 98531 USA del at fandrichpiano.com ddfandrich at gmail.com Phone 360.736.7563 From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Dale Erwin Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2011 8:36 PM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: [CAUT] Fwd: Lacquered hammers Ok In short. I'll stick to what Joe said. HE had no knowledge about hardeners being used prior to his coming but he also said he did not get the impression that any thing had changed that much either. SO extrapolate or not The felt they were using in 1947 when he joined Steinway as I stated earlier was really good. That said he stated that they usually chose to us a dilute solution of lacquer and some form of thinner in only two places. The first was around the bass tenor break with the low tenor hammers receiving some hardener. The other was the top octave area. He and Ray both confirm that the Standard felt was either bought out or went out of biz sometime in the 60s. I'll double check on that. Then Steinway started with another felt company which I don't recall for sure if that was American. In the early 1970s it was Bacon felt. It may have been GAF prior to that. Someplace in there Bacon acquired GAF and began using their hammer felt process. It was, I think, a faster process. I'm not sure it was better. If one is exposed to enough original sets of pre -war Steinway hammers and tried to get needles into the suckers then the odds are greater that you can't because there too D_ _ _ hard due to lacquer/shellac/or magic crystals. When that solution was applied of course is anybodys guess but it was obviously done for a reason. SO lets extrapolate! ok?Somebody wanted a change in tone. Odd. I've been exposed to quite a few pre-war Steinway hammers and have rarely found evidence of chemical hardeners. ddf -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110219/0880f00c/attachment.htm>
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