Hi everybody, I'm back from vacation :-( and from tuning for a large sale in the Civic Center for a Baldwin dealer in Beaumont. :-) Early starting and late stopping. The dealer treated me great though: put me up in a nice Holiday Inn, paid for some meals, gave me extra pay above what my actual bill was and still wantsme to come back whenever I have a day or two to work. All in all, a great dealer to work for. They even give a 10 yr. warranty on most of their used instruments. He stands behind the instrument and the work. Way too many pianos (app. 100) for one person to tune in the time available but I managed to get all the grands and a few of the verticals tuned. Thought some of you might be interested in comments on the new Wurlitzer grands made by Samick for Baldwin. I haven't had much experience with Samicks but from what I have had, these Wurlitzers are an improvement. Especially in tone. I *think* the hammers are from Baldwin (red underfelt) and are a lot softer than the ones Samicks usually have. So the basic tone is much improved. Even the very small ones don't sound too bad and the ones over 5' sound fairly good. Some *almost* too soft. Except for having to do pitch raises on them all, the biggest problem they seem to consistently have is very poor damper regulation. They all had notes, from the trichord section on down, which did not dampen well at all. The dampers would twist as they came out of the strings and some were bent to one side or the other enough that a string would ring through. So I spent several hours working on dampers instead of tuning. The only other problem I noticed was that a tuning pin or two in the tenor area on one piano was so close to the stretcher wood that even my rounded head tip mashed into the wood a little as I tried to turn the pin. All could use a thorough prepping of course, but if/when these problems are corrected, they might have a fairly decent low-cost grand if other problems don't surface with use and age. Quite a way to end my vacation, but at least it got me back into a work mode to get ready for school to start next week. Regards, Avery ___________________________ Avery Todd, RPT Moores School of Music (__) University of Houston (oo) Mathematical Cow Houston, TX 77204-4893 /---------\/ (Developer of cow-culus) 713-743-3226 / | x=a(b)|| 713-743-3226 * ||------|| atodd@uh.edu ~~ ~~ http://www.music.uh.edu/
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