Chickering Actions

[Michael Wathen]

I would argue for keeping as much of the origianl action as possible.
Chickering was an innovator.  His actions and pianos were engineered to the
max. I have a 6'5" Chickering in my living room.  It is the best piano I
have ever owned and I've had some good ones.

This piano is from 1895.  It has the original board but shimmed.  I recapped
everything and had Sanderson design a new scale and make bass strings.  The
original dampers fascinated me.  I thought long and hard.  The quality of
the felts were better than anything I could presently buy. So I kept them.

The action still needs work.  I plan to make my own hammer shanks.  The
hammer shanks are not bushed but rather the flange (brass) itself contains
the bushing. The drop screw is located on the hammer shank.  I was missing
two brass flanges so I took it to a local machinist.  He did a draw up of
the flange and was amazed at the engineering of just that part. All the
measurements were well thought out to the point you could see how each facet
was selected. For example,  the distance from either end of the flange to
the center of the screw hole was something that made sense like 5/8" rather
than some oddball figure like 19/64".  He was going to make a few for me
when he got a chance.  He said he would make an entire set for $750.  There
is no need for this since what remains is perfectly good.  I will eventually
replace the felt bushings with Steinway teflon inserts.

This piano also has agraffes all the way through.  There is no string duplex
either in the front or in the back.  I like duplex so I had the machinist
make two steel half round rods one for each of the top two treble sections.
The bars are placed between the agraffe and the tuning pin so that the
strings bear against it about 3/8" away from the agraffe.

For the other side of the bridge I was not so much concerned with wanting a
duplex as I was with controlling the down bearing.  I took 3 and 4" cut off
segments of bass strings with the copper still on.  I had an unused bass
string set which had been sitting around for quite some time.  I could
select the diameters I needed to raise the string up at the hitch pin and
thus control the down bearing.  Since this board was over a hundred years
old I decided to have only minimal bearing.  I did this for the whole piano.
Since the strings bear against these cut segments just before the reach the
hitch pin they allow the this non speaking portion of the string to
sympathetically vibrate, kind of a duplex.

Sometime in the not too disatnt future I will put a sample of the sound from
this piano on my homepage as well as a photo of the duplex.
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Michael J. Wathen			Phone:	513-556-9565
Piano Technician			Fax:	513-556-3399
College-Consevatory of Music		Email:  Michael.Wathen@UC.Edu
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0096

http://www.uc.edu/~wathenmj