<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; = charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 5.50.4134.600" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV> Ari Isaac. Hammermaker’s corner3.   Boyceville NY is a lovely small town, or is it a village, in the = Catskill Mountains. Lots of woods, fresh air and quiet, you hardly know = you’ve passed through, that’s how small it is. Everyone was at lunch by the time we arrived, Dave and I, at Ronson = that day. Marty Negron suggested we go for lunch and look at the plant after. He = told us where we could find a nice place for lunch and we found it easily. Chicken soup with Matzaballs high up on the everyday menu? I was a = bit surprised. I asked the owner, who was also the waitress about it. She = said she’d worked with a Jewish woman somewhere who’d taught her how to make = chicken soup. I ordered a bowl and when I tasted it I realized at once that this was = not the kind of ordinary chicken soup to soothe the sniffles, no. This was the = kind of chicken soup that restored your sense of self. The kind that made you = know for certain that this world is the best place to be living in. The very kind = of chicken soup God revealed to king Solomon, the wisest of men who had a = thousand wives, one night at the beginning of king Solomon’s reign, along = with many other wisdoms and secrets and God warned Solomon to reveal the recipe to no = more than one hundred and thirty five of his 1000 wives on pain of loosing his = wisdom. Solomon was not in the habit of taking too much notice of what God = instructed. After all, when you’re the wisest of men what God says to do or = not loses some of its importance. He knew, though, in his gut, that this time God was = not kidding and he made sure to reveal the recipe to no more than 135, or = was it 137. After making love, that week, to 132 of the 547 wives currently = resident in the harem, just at the moment he was about to initiate foreplay with the = 133d, a country girl whose taste in these matters he wasn’t sure of, king = Solomon had a momentary lapse of memory so he ended up revealing the secret of the = chicken soup to two more wives than God had allowed. What is certain is that = those two wives disappeared from this world very soon after and were condemned to = be the progenitors of semi intelligent life on a another planet in a far off galaxy. When we came back to Ronson Marty Negron showed me the entire process = and helped me to my first significant realization about hammer making. He showed me the cutting of the felt sheet into strips and the next = step was the pre-pressing of the strips. They were put into a press, dry, no glue = and pressed into the cawl, or the former of the strike point to shoulder = radius of the hammer by a steel ruler as long as the strip of felt. The strip was = left in that press for a few minutes and then taken out. Something didn’t make sense to me at that moment. I had been = taught, like everyone else in the piano business, that hammer felt had to have = resilience. If so, why pre-press it. After the pre-pressing, when I looked at the strip = from its bass or treble end, it was no longer flat but had been forced into = the shape of a letter V. It appeared to me (and it still does) that whatever = resilience there had been in that felt before – it, or most of it, was gone = now. What is certain is that the press used to, actually, glue up the hammers, can be = considerably weaker once the felt strips are pre-pressed. That energy, = the very one not needed now to finally press the hammers is taken away from = producing tone – that became obvious to me that day at Ronson. I resolved right there and then never to pre-press any felt I was = going to use and to have my felt made with the absolute maximum resilience, = spring, possible to build in. Thinking about the pre-pressing it became obvious to me that, = thinking backwards, pre-pressing to those hammer makers who used this way, made = sense only if it was effective in getting the felt strip to accept and retain = the letter V shape forced onto it by the steel ruler pushing the felt into = the cawl. If the felt those hammer makers ordered was too springy to retain the V = shape pre-pressing would be ineffective, ergo… pre-pressing meant, and = means today since, I believe Steinways, Renner and a few others continue to = pre-press, ordering felt sheets with less spring. No more than acceptable for the = strip to retain the letter V shape. The presses used to glue up the hammers were very hot, I estimated = they were heated to 180-200F. The hammers, at that time, were left in the press = for 20 minutes. I touched the felt it seemed to me, at that time, that the = density of their strips was fairly uniform from bass to treble, something = didn’t quite come together in my head. That something became the conviction, embodied in = the felt I use to make Isaac hammers, that the hammer-string impact has to match = the taughtness of the strings being struck. In the bass, where the strings = aren’t very taught, the hammer needs to, as it were, chase the vibrating string = and keep pushing energy into it so it must be a bit less dense. As the = strings become more taught towards the treble the same, relatively softer hammer = will simply damp the tone completely unless, that is, the felt is denser and = the hammer is harder. Not harder as in inflexible but like a gradually = stiffer spring is harder than a softer spring. The next big step, for me, was now the building of a hammer press and = both felt and hammer cutting equipment. </DIV></BODY></HTML>