Jack: I have a piano in my shop now which came in with this pinned capstan setup. >From my perspective there are several ways you can go: 1. Keep the design (and the original parts) - This allows original engineering, which should work fine as long as your replacement hammers are not too heavy. But you have to mess with the rocker capstans (anyone who has tricks for these I'm all ears). 2. Install new wippens from the Renner kit, and install capstans. This gives you a chance to process action geometry and have a hand at design yourself. Again, you will not want to get too heavy on the hammers, and before deciding you will want to play with the configurations. Jim Coleman Sr. mentioned the superiority of the pinned capstan because of low friction - you will want to be sure the capstan/wippen foot contact point crosses the key balance bottom hole/wippen center line for minimum friction. You will want to regulate out the samples and be sure that all the coincident arcs works at the jack/knuckle point also (hammercenter/wippen center line), and you will want to measure the keystick to obtain the best ratio. I used old Yamaha grand keys from an ivorite replacement job, cut out the capstan section, trimmed the bottom and glued in place on the key after determining correct location. (Get this right; you don't want to go back and relocate later). 3. The cheap retrofit: do the same as above, but with original wippens. This is what I did on the grand in my shop. Make your own sample wippen foot blocks, cut the bottom of an existing wippen flat, and work with your samples until it works, as in 2 above. Renner USA sells several sizes of wippen feet - I think the longest is 21mm, which is what worked for me. Again, don't use hammers that are too heavy - a great application for the Renner and Abel light varieties. #3 is cheaper but timeconsuming; doubly so if you boo-boo and have to fix your mistakes. #2 is ideal - you end up with new action parts, an easy-to-regulate hammer line and a wealth of experience. Someone will have to pay for the parts, of course....Hopefully the client will - it sounds like quite a piano. Any other ideas out there? Good Luck, and let us know how it goes! Bill Shull University of Redlands, La Sierra University Loma Linda, CA In a message dated 99-05-28 01:55:39 EDT, you write: << I have in my care a George Steck 8'-9'(?) grand with a very unusual whippen/capstan configuration. Instead of a cushion, the whippens are pinned to a kind of sticker(flange?). One end of the sticker is pinned to the whippen and the other is pinned to the capstan. (Thankfully, this end has a set screw!) The capstan is the double screw type capstan accessible only with an offset screwdriver. I don't relish the thought of loosening 88 set screws just to remove the stack, nor do I look forward to regulating the hammer blow once I replace the hammers. My question is this: If I replace the odd whippens with conventional ones and replace the old capstans with 1"(?) dowel capstans, am I asking for trouble with the action geometry? Does anybody have any experience/suggestions for how to go about changing them? Or is it better just to live with the old parts if they are still serviceable? Okay, okay, that's three questions, but you get the idea. Thanks, Jack Lofton, RPT Seattle >>
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