PD 520

[Ferdinand Pointer]

>Who makes the PianoDisc pianos? Are they usually noisy? I received a
>call from a someone who bought a PD 520 at christmas and now has what
>sounded over the phone like a loud slap at hammer return. The sound
>occurs playing manually or by the Pdisc.
>
>Anything unique to these pianos that I should know before I go look at
>it?

>Richard Anderson, RPT

Dear Richard and list,
As has been said by several,  the PianoDisc is made by Young Chang but you
will not see any more of them. The pianos comming from PianoDisc now have
the name Knabe on them but they are still made by  Young Chang as before.
These instruments come from the factory in Korea with the keys overhanging
the keyframe 3/4" so the solinoids have a place to lift them. The keybed
already has the slot cut for the solinoid rails to fit into.

The sound you hear on return comes from at least two different sources. One
is the knuckles and the other is the jack stop felt punching. The knuckle
problem was addressed in an earlier post of mine on this list. You have to
soften them, because after a number of hours of playing and I don't know how
many hours this is, they get kind of hard and glazed. As I have tried many
methods the longest lasting I have found involves saturating the inside felt
of each knuckle with a 50-50 mixture of alcahol and fabric softener. While
they are good and wet squeeze the outside from front to back with duck bill
pliers. When this all dries, in a couple of hours, use Teflon powder and
check your hammer height. When you get the hammers back up off the rail to a
reasonable height, the whole thing will play a lot better. In case you
missed it the hammers are always too low when you find this condition as the
pounding has packed the lifter felt as well as the knuckles.

The jack stop punchings are rather hard felt as this keeps regulation a lot
better by not packing down. The YC action uses a flat spoon to stop the jack
on return. This is perfactly flat and is met by a hard punching. The
resulting slap is quit auditable especially on low volumn playing. I use a
long slinder voicing needle, as used for sugar coating through the strings,
to stick the sides of this hard thick punching to reduce the slapping sound
on return of the jack. I hope this helps you.

 There are a whole new set of service needs starting to show up in the
electronic players and I see a lot of them as I have installed over
sixty-five of these units and service factory installed units in the Tampa
Bay area. I hope some other PianoDisc technicians are out there on line to
contribute to this thread.

Ferdinand Pointer, RPT
Clearwater, FL