<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi Alan Thanks for the welcome.  Been rather swamped with work these past months and have only been able to contribute sporadically on pianotech.  As for the Stanwood FW's.  Let me first say I also respect Stanwoods work and appreciate what his thinking has led to.  That said, the Stanwood formula as written is the only thing that is patent protected. In other words, you can calculate Front Weights all you want as long as you dont use his formula, or a derivative of it.  Even that probably wouldnt hold up in a legal confrontation....but heck... why bother fighting it in the first place. Its important to know that the Stanwood formula is really a cute bypass of needing to calculate the acurate ratio for the whippen and hammer shank levers individually in the exact position they are when the action is in balance.  He only needs the key ratio to find the overall ratio, because of the way he uses Balance Weight in the formula.  If you use simple Archemides rules for combining levers you simply come up with              <blockquote>Action Weight  = ((SW x HR x WR) + WW ) </blockquote> The weight felt at the front of the key is the Action Weight times the Key Ratio so the whole thing becomes <blockquote>(((SW x HR x WR) + WW ) * KR) </blockquote> Which is a direct derivative of the basic d1 * W1 = d2 * W2 as applied to three levers Action Weight is what you need to balance with FW and BW.  i.e. <blockquote>FW + BW =  (((SW x HR x WR) + WW ) * KR) </blockquote> Calculating FW's from here is a snap and perfectly legal as this formula is essentially 2500 years or so old.  The hitch is that you need to also calculate individually and correctly the correct ratio for the hammer shank and whippen individually in their positions when the action is at half stroke.  Rather tricky it would seem.... but you can by pass that problem again by a good approximation.  You end up close enough that your target balance weight is within 1-2 grams of your resulting one and since any error applies to the whole action uniformly, you can simply go back and add or subtract exactly that much of FW as needed... if you even bother.   I personally have absolutly no problem using this approach anytime I wish.  Davids way is  more accurate and I respect his patent completely.  But this way is plenty accurate enough and really a bit quicker as you only need to measure one key and dont need to rely on your BW measuring techniques... which btw can be shown to vary rather widely from person to person. Food for thought anyways. Cheers Alan RicB </body> </html>