Jasper American Piano

[Ron Nossaman]

>I've tried everything on these. Sometimes,
>if you take your brass rod (used for seating strings) and put pressure on
>the bridge pin, the beat stops. I've even tried tapping them in a little
>further, didn't seem to work. I believe that some of the falseness on a
>Kimball is because the bearing bar is often flat, instead of being a nice
>rounded surface, but of course, you can't take off the strings and re-shape
>it unless you're re-stringing the piano.
>    I once sat through a three hour class which promised to address the
>issue, only to find that the instructor didn't really have anything
>practical to offer about curing this problem. 

I don't have anything practical to offer either, unfortunately. I wish I
did. At one time or another I've tried about everything anyone's ever
mentioned and a few things no one should ever do (EVER). All spot
experimentation done at my expense because I don't recall ever having a
customer complain about "those wild strings up there" and offer to pay for
the attempt. My current conclusion is that the best I can hope for with
tuning these gems (K&J) is minimum garbage with what the piano will give
me. Coincidentally, that's the best I can hope for with any other piano
too, but the final result will be somewhat more pleasing to me on a better
instrument. I think if those nice rotary cut horizontally laminated bridges
had an equally nice rotary cut horizontally laminated cap with much thinner
laminations, so there was some actual structural integrity to the cap at
the top, and they were reasonably accurately notched, with minimum #7 sized
pins and up instead of #6, the pins wouldn't be nearly as loose, and they
wouldn't be anywhere near as wild and wooly to tune as they are. They'd
still go out of tune quicker and farther than anything else out there with
any climate shift, but they'd probably tune a whole lot cleaner in the
treble. I suspect that doesn't qualify as a pre-tuning  field repair though.

Ron N