Brian writes: << > Every time I think I've figured out just how bad a piano 'untouched by a > tuning for a decade' will be, it'll surprise me. >> > Sometimes things actually go better than expected. :-) > I hope yours does too, Ed. > Have a good day. Greetings, I have had a pretty good day, yes. I have just come back from that Kawai KG2-D(untuned in the four years since purchase, new). I found that the bass and mid section were 25 and 27 cents, repectively, flat. Above C5, things began to deteriorate, finally reaching 70 cents flat in the last octave. I moved a few strings in the top section while listening, then gave the whole area a silent pull up,(approx 3 minutes). Then found the octave below had dropped another 10 cents, so I gave a silent raise to one string in each unison for that section, spending another 60 seconds to throw this piano into something of a balance my machine could compensate with. The low tenor didn't move much in response to this, so I began the pitch raise with the SAT calculator giving me a 25% overpull, at the break, and remeasuring every octave. I was pulling things up to near A-442 right from the start. I use the una corda to tune the middle string first, then release it to tune the left side string, move the mute to the next space between notes and tune the right side string of the unison. I do it this way to halve the number of times I pick up the mute, to have an eaiser target to hit with the mute when I do move it, and to give my feet something to do while I tune. If I miss a target on the machine, I don't correct it, I just let the next string compensate. I pull strings sharp enough so that releasing the hammer with a slight wiggle drops that string close enough to a reasonable tension. For me, speed comes from giving the pin only one push flat after having pulled it sharp enough to blur the lights. (not counting a bump flat to break any corrosion). This single stoke downward to pitch also bypasses the majority of sticky pin problems. I do the bass last, from the break down. Total pitch raise time so far is about 20 minutes and I have it at 440 +- 2cents. I could never get it near this close, this fast, by ear. Thank you Sanderson, Scott and Reyburn, machina magica, indeed! I took a break to clean the pencils out of the action, and tighten the pedal brackets. Another 10 minutes brings the total up to 1/2 hour and I am ready to tune. ( I will seat and level strings in December, when this wire has finished moving so much) I tuned it from A1 to C88, using the pitch correction calcultor to accomodate those last 2 cent deviant sections. It took an hour, so total tech time was 90 minutes. Including travel time, it was a 2 hour billing at $75 per hour. They were stunned at how nice the piano sounded and scheduled a December tuning. What they were also stunned by was only paying $150 to play catch-up for the 12 missed tunings over the pianos first four years. They thought it would be a lot more! Regards, Ed Foote RPT
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