misc.

[k.swafford@genie.geis.com]

      Excuse me for not pasting in all the posts that I am commenting
 on here:

      I share the notion that the best pianos are new ones.  I also
 hold the belief that old Steinways can be spectacular.  Pianos must be
 considered individually.  My own piano, a 1927 Steinway M, is a very
 good specimen that I wouldn't trade for anything that I can think of.
 But, I service an early 30's M that is such a dog I expect it to bark.

      Pianos begin their inexorable march towards their inevitable
 deaths as they are being built, not later.  The variability of wood
 and, consequently, of pianos is a source of constant fascination.
 Some pianos go wildly out of tune, some just don't;  some pianos
 deteriorate quickly and become unusable, while others seem to remain
 serviceable forever; it may just be the luck of the draw.

      A cynic might say that rebuilders only prolong the death of
 pianos.

      I was trained as a rebuilder.  I once spent a day and half(!), as
 an apprentice, pulling the pins from the long bridge of an ~1890
 Steinway C.  That particular bridge, made from stunningly dense wood,
 was still intact after 90 years.  But each one of us piano technicians
 is likely to have seen bridges that were failing after less than ten
 years.  In order to guarantee the quality of our rebuilding work,
 bridge cracks, both visible and invisible, and other deterioration of
 the bridges must be dealt with as a normal part of rebuilding.  I was
 taught that any piano being restrung without a new brige or bridgecap
 should have the bridge pins pulled and reinstalled with epoxy as a
 matter of course.  The joke is, "When the strings are off, the
 bridge pins must be pulled, unless the piano itself comes up with the
 pins in the attempt."

      Thin, syrupy, slow-curing epoxy will find its way into the cracks
 and crevices, increasing the structural integrity of the parts.  You
 will find no better demonstration of the existence of unseen bridge
 cracks than pushing a bridge pin down into its epoxy-soaked hole only
 to see another bridge pin as much as a foot away ooze back out of its
 hole as the first pin is pushed down.  It can be entertaining (if
 you're in the right mood) getting all of the pins to stay in place
 when for each pin that is pushed down one or more others come back
 up.

      I don't know that I would go so far as to describe an epoxied
 bridge as "better than new," but it will be much improved.  By the
 way, I was taught to be very wary of installing over-sized bridge
 pins, especially without epoxy;  the idea was that
 larger-than-original pins, installed without epoxy, could actually
 exacerbate the cracking and worsen the condition of the bridge, rather
 than improving it.

      And also by the way, I suppose epoxy can be used successfully in
 pinblocks, but I have never used epoxy for pinblocks because I have
 had some unhappy experiences dealing with the after-effects of tuning
 pins that were driven back into pinblocks before the epoxy had cured.
 I simply don't buy the notion that one can turn the pin at some point
 and reliably break its bond with the epoxy.  I have pulled epoxied
 pins because they were not holding/tuning correctly only to find them
 coated with clumps of epoxy -- no wonder they weren't working right.
 Exercise extreme caution.

      And by the way yet again, it is easy to imagine that the bridges
 that would give the best results would be those in which the bridge
 pins are firmly seated in the bottom of their holes.  However, I know
 from painful experience that Steinway has not always carefully
 controlled the depth of bridge pin holes.  If you attempt to bottom
 out bridge pins in bridges where the depths of the holes were not
 controlled, a bridge pin could easily disappear completely into a
 bridge.  It happened to me;  I don't want to talk about it.  The
 possibility that there might be empty space beneath bridge pins is
 another argument, I think, in favor of epoxying bridge pins.




                                              Kent Swafford