Seating/false beats

[Ron Nossaman]

Hi Richard & to whom it may concern who isn't burned out yet,

comments interspersed



At 08:05 PM 4/28/97 +0100, you wrote:
>Well Ron et al,
>
>It would seem that we have this mostly figured out. The question
>remains, how do we apply this model? Do we;
>1. Continue to seat strings on the bridge knowing it is only temporary
>but helps a little?
>2. Stop seating strings realizing that we're actually destabilizing the
>instrument a little?




I'm assuming a good enough, new enough piano, in a reasonable state of repair, where the demands of the situation are such that a near perfect tuning is warranted. At risk of starting another thread (not my intent), Most of us won't spend extraordinary am
ounts of time chasing phantoms in junk. You can't enhance the luster of fecal material! On the other hand, in a concert situation, junk is too often what you have to work with and you do whatever is necessary.

If the piano is new to me, I'd tap them down, if necessary, the first time. I'd also do any voicing, string leveling, etc that was called for, and time and budget allowed. In a periodic maintenance situation, like a church or school, I don't do it. The re
sults are transient, as evidenced by the return of the noises between tunings, so nothing has been fixed by the process. Given the potential for accelerated degradation of the bridge, I leave well enough alone. In other words, I do it rarely, and only if
unavoidable.





>3. Regard bridge resurfacing/recapping as a necessary part of
>restringing/rebuilding, as we do resurfacing the capo bar etc.?

Yes, yes, yes.

>   If so, do we;
>      a. maintain a flat bridge top and remove all the groove but
>risk
>         loosing some bearing?
>      b. resurface to remove only the groove and end up with a
>crowned
>         bridge surface?
>

a. Definitely a. Realistically, if you take the bridge down to, or near,  the bottom of the string groove, you haven't lost a bit of bearing except at the center of the bridge. You don't want that higher than the edges anyway. The effective bearing loss h
as already happened by the time the rebuild comes up. Also, I wonder if the pre-compressed wood under the grooves at the edges of the bridge are less prone to further crush in the second life cycle (after rebuild).  Incidentally, I measured the grooves at
 the deepest point in that old "B" in the shop and found them to be about .005 inch! That won't make an awful lot of difference in the angular deflection (bearing) of the string across the bridge. I would consider a flat bridge top necessary for clean ter
mination at the bridge for the reasons you mentioned in earlier posts.


>Certainly the answer depends on many factors, but I'll be paying more
>attention to bridges on all future jobs.
>

Me too. We all ultimately make up our own minds about anything, but I think we have better ammunition now than we had before.

>Richard Anderson, RPT
>Elgin, IL
>
>


Thanks to all who participated in this interminable thread. I'm pretty satisfied with what we've narrowed it down to (pending further enlightenment). We've all been taught a lot of things that probably just ain't so, and continue to offer them up as expla
nations without qualification and validation. That's what all this was for. Ignorance is universal. We all have plenty and are generally willing to share. The wonderful thing about ignorance, however, is that it can be fixed. With the application of a lit
tle skepticism, and the reluctance to accept Voodoo explanations, we may eventually know something about what we do for a living. Thanks for the suspension of popular belief, and level headed creative critique that got us this far.


 Ron Nossaman