<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> An excellent commentary.  I would go so far as to say thee most valuable thing with Stanwood methodology is the ability to provide such even levels of mass in both hammer and key resulting in unprecedented evenness of BW. I am less enthused with some of the ratio design applications of this methodology I've seen I have to admit that. But when it comes to balancing a well designed action... nothing can come close.  Once an appropriate set of hammer SW's is chosen for the given action... and instrument otherwise....  it is then that Stanwood really comes into its own IMHO. I'd agree about the extremes on both ends.... they are instructive to be sure... but somewhere in the middle resides that comfortable responsive range me thinks. As for comments about appropriate hammers with respect to denseness and weight relative to soundboard responsiveness. These are interesting to be sure, and tho I do not discount them in any sense of the word, I do miss the kind of data that sheds light on user end preferences of the sort that Stanwood has provided for actions, and I tho such data will probably never exist... I do wonder at what it would reveal. Cheers RicB <blockquote> We are very fortunate to have talented and creditable techs at both ends of this spectrum.  Even if it comes to be that some middle ground is what prevails long term, as I expect, look at what we have learned in the process!  Deep down those with strong feelings one way or the other hopefully can agree on that.  May that spirit and discussion of challenging ideas we saw take root in our organization maybe 10-15 years ago...  continue.  From the experiments I tried with M-'s leadless (or even near leadless) method there was too much first inertia to feel comfortable, or perhaps just too different from what most players are familiar with.  The beauty of Stanwood's approach is that is the ideas are sound and applicable to any weight range of hammers.  We have seen the presentation and marketing of ideas change profoundly in PTG over the past 10+ years however, for reasons I don't pretend to understand.  It is what it is, and I suppose you can't fault people for trying to maximize income. cheers, Dennis Johnson St. Olaf College</blockquote> </body> </html>