20 tons of tension

[harvey]

[Lost thread reply flood -- catching up]

Conrad/list,

It doesn't matter which manufacturer you're recalling. The general idea of
your recollection is accurate. I think there were other responses to this,
but the general idea is that, like the Golden Gate bridge, the Oakland bay
bridge, and the railroad's Warren truss bridges are all different in
design, the same results can be accomplished by different methods. In a
piano, the structural integrity or strength can either come from the entire
back assembly, or, it can be derived from a different approach -- usually
in plate casting. Did anyone ever find it curious that Everett featured and
touted I-beam back posts, then used wooden wedges to make the fixed lengths
reach the outer perimeter of the back? I'm painting this with a broad
brush, just to get to the next point.

Next point. There was a lot of squeaking about the inability to sell
instruments without backposts. Supposedly, the squeaking was coming from
the American buying public. I never heard this from any
American-buying-public-type-person. I only heard it from regional sales
representatives, who probably echoed complaints from dealers, when they
were deprived of something to talk about and point to during a sales
presentation. Similar squeaking was heard from the same sources regarding:

1. absence of staples in hammers
2. the color of hammer underfelt, and the presence/absence thereof
3. hammer shoulder "reinforcement" (coloring)
4. how much the hammer felt weighed
5. whether a vertical pinblock should be covered with felt, veneer, or nothing
6. how many plies are in a pinblock;
7. blued versus nickel-plated tuning pins
8. and the list goes on and on.

Back to the back. There were some products where, for whatever reason,
backposts were simply added as peace (or is that piece?) of mind insurance.
Their presence added nothing to the structure or tuning stability of the
units in question. As a test of this, token offerings were made to the gods
of stability. Backposts were saw-kerfed. The piano did not implode, the
tuning stability did not suffer. The backposts were then sawed out of the
piano. Same results.

This is not to say that backposts are not necessary in all cases. It's just
to say that, in the interest of SALES, backposts were *added* to certain
models as something to point at and look upon. The posts were nothing more
than expensive window dressing or "eye-candy".

At 06:47 PM 8/28/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Could someone confirm what I think is a real memory?
>
>I seem to recall hearing that a well known oriental manufacturer (at least
>one) put backposts on pianos destined for the US, but those for other
>markets (with the identical scales) were served up without. 
>
>The reason given at the time was that the Americans were conditioned by
>decades of sales hype to believe that a piano couldn't possible be good
>without looking like the proverbial outdoor comfort station.  So... even
>though the plate was sustaining the strain of the tension, the sales force
>could show off the backposts.
>
>Which make might I have heard that from?
>
>Any euro-techs what to comment on tuning stability of "backless" pianos?
>
>Conrad 


Jim Harvey, RPT
harvey@greenwood.net