I would bet that Stawood protocols probably were driven to fruition by all those unintended consequences you refer to David. The ones that produced action ratios all over the map. And the hammers getting heavier put on high ratio actions from pre-war times.  So,...  Finally after hearing thousands of pianist complain about heavy actions & funky tone, the collective technicians consciousness said "Enough is enough is enough. All fix the  d_ _ _ thing & voila. David Stanwoods protocols were popularized, utilized and refined to the betterment of the piano world.  So I think we have fired the designer <div> </div> <div> </div> <div style="clear: both;">Dale S. Erwin www.Erwinspiano.com Custom restoration Ronsen Piano hammers Join the Weickert felt Revolution 209-577-8397 209-985-0990 </div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div style="font-family: arial,helvetica; font-size: 10pt; color: black;">-----Original Message----- From: David Love <davidlovepianos@comcast.net> To: caut@ptg.org Sent: Mon, Mar 7, 2011 8:07 pm Subject: Re: [CAUT] Steinway sound <div id="AOLMsgPart_0_cfb25848-c548-4283-ab18-904d8fdaf738" style="margin: 0px; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,Sans-Serif; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> <pre style="font-size: 9pt;"><tt>That's assuming that you agree that all the changes that happened were actually deliberate "design changes". I'm more cynical. I think it's often more the law of unintended consequences than a conscious decision to change the design. A change of hammer making protocols or suppliers of felt and molding produces a hammer that weighs two or three grams more than the original, with a 16 mm knuckle it results in 7 leads in the bass or, combined with an inexact plate indexing procedure, sometimes 9 leads. People complain, eventually they move to 17 mm knuckle, people still complain, they start trimming the hammer, the 17 mm knuckle doesn't work that well with the old wippen so they modify all the parts and voila! A new design of new and improved parts. Or, apropos to this discussion, some well intentioned individual from the outside decides that the original +3 gram hammer was a design intention and seeks to modify the action ratio to be able to handle it, keep the original 3-2-1-0 leading pattern to control inertia and ends up with 1/2 inch key dip--but damn that thing feels light. All because the hammer unexpectedly got heavy due to a careless manufacturing. I'm not suggesting that represents any particular factual sequence of events but it seems more likely than that each of those was a conscious design change. Of course, since the action ratios do vary quite a bit and different pianists of different eras got used to all kinds of things, you might have to make a decision as to what to do and in the process one pianist somewhere who grew up on 7.0 action ratios and 9 leads in the bass might be unhappy. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take a chance and make an executive decision to put things together in such a way that you think is likely to please or at least be pleasantly accepted by the great majority. We have to do that all the time and most venues only have one piano. There comes a time in every similar endeavor when you have to close the book, shoot the designer and build the damn thing (and take your chances). David Love <a href="http://www.davidlovepianos.com" target="_blank">www.davidlovepianos.com</a> This raises an interesting point: Since (like all other manufacturers of all other products) S&S reserves to itself the right to change it's specifications in whatever way, and at whatever time they choose. So...following the logic of that logic (if you will), it's pretty obvious that (keeping things to actions), the "touch" would have changed fairly dramatically over time; and, the more one works on instruments from various periods the more one might come to this conclusion. And, it might, therefore, follow, that one could legitimately use whatever parts are contemporaneously available today in order to attempt to recreate whatever that original touch (and tone) might have been, and stay within the overall concept of retaining the "Steinway-ness" of the instrument. That part is all well and good; and, I think, qualifies as A Very Good Thing. On the other hand, when one chooses to follow that logic, one has to be aware that not every pianist is going to feel ecstatic about either the sound or the touch. So, another choice one makes in following the above logic is the one that consciously accepts that one's final product may not be acceptable to one or more pianists. If one has multiple performance instruments, that may be cool, because, presumably (since one might choose to leave at least one with a relatively current "stock" setup) there would be other instruments from which to choose, and it wouldn't matter so much if one were not deemed satisfactory. However, if one has only one performance instrument available in a given space, one might wind up with a fairly serious problem. FWIW, statements like the one Jennie relates can often be traced back to the sales pitches developed by the old Piano Travelers' Association. While in the context Jennie relates, the brand name is Steinway, many of these statements/pitches were developed to be used by a Traveler in their day-to-day work, and modified as necessary to fit whatever brand happened to be on the truck. Best. Horace </tt></pre> </div>  </div>