oddities puzzler

[Ron Nossaman]

For those of you that are getting really really really really sick and
tired of hearing about electile disfunction...

I tuned a 5' 9" (135cm)  Bush & Lane today. It had been
resomethingorothered sometime in the past, and wasn't in such good shape
(concave soundboard, and zero to negative bearing in the killer octave
area), but seemed like a pretty well designed and built piano that has more
potential than was achieved with the resomethingorothering. While I was
strip muting it, and admiring the scale layout, I noticed something just a
tad on the unusual side. The counter bearing bar in the bass section was
lying between the agraffes and the step up to the tuning pin field level
where it was supposed to have been. There wasn't a string anywhere near
touching it, but they effectively corralled it to the extent that the bar
was trapped in the space. The strings in the bass section came through the
agraffes, and dragged across the plate surface to the bottom of the
expanded coil on the tuning pin. 

Very interesting. I couldn't for the life of me imagine how this came to
be. It can't be realistically possible that the bar scooted back and fell
in the pit sometime after stringing, so it was either not placed where it
belonged when the piano was strung, or was displaced when the bass string
tension was let down at some future date. As to why the bass string tension
would have been let down to that degree, I can only guess. Apparently to
expedite the displacement of the counter bearing bar, the better to loosen
the coils so the string could more effectively drag the plate - the better
to ? 

Now THIS is a puzzler.

Ron N