felt knuckles????

[Delwin D Fandrich]

----- Original Message -----
From: "robert goodale" <rrg@nevada.edu>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: September 29, 2000 1:21 AM
Subject: Re: felt knuckles????


> You will find this #%*&!! on a lot of Aeolian "pianers" from the 70's era.
> I've seen several Knabes and Mason & Hamlins from that era with it.  I
> particularly like how they colored it to look like buckskin so that nobody
> would notice, (ha ha).  Regulating one of these is futile and forget about
> repetition.  Whoever came up with that idea must have been buddies with
the
> guy at Baldwin who decided that corfam was a good material for upright
hammer
> butts.  The guy who invented the "New Coke" formula was probably his room
> mate.
>
> Rob Goodale, RPT
> Las Vegas, NV
>
---------------------------------------------------------

I cannot speak for decisions made at Aeolian. The decision to use the
original Corfam material as a replacement for buckskin, however, was a good
and reasonable one at the time and under the circumstances.

For a variety of reasons, mostly political, but well beyond the control of
Baldwin, the natural buckskin traditionally used for knuckles and hammer
butts was becoming difficult, if not impossible, to get at any price in the
quantities needed for their production. And the obscene worldwide -- OK,
mostly the U.S. -- demand for beef had not yet reached the level that we
were willing to sacrifice a good deal of its crop lands and devastate a good
share of the worlds rain forests to ensure a steady supply. A demand which
leaves, of course, a surplus of residual cowhides. (It's pretty hard to get
at the beef without first removing the hide.)

Manufacturers such as Baldwin were faced with basically two choices. Find
alternate materials or close down operations. In either case they were going
to face criticism from some front. For some strange reason -- probably
because they were most immediately responsible to their stockholders -- they
chose to search out alternate materials and remain in business.

What they came up with was the original Corfam, a material that had been
developed, and was being manufactured, by DuPont as a substitute for
leather. It was a quite reasonable substitute material. It passed all of
Baldwin's testing -- including aging -- procedures and was ultimately placed
in production. The original material supplied to Baldwin by DuPont worked
very well. DuPont, however, subsequently sold the factory and the process to
another firm who took it upon themselves to alter the formula and/or the
process without informing its customers. And, therein lay a problem. The
altered material had a tendency to become quite hard over time.

As soon as Baldwin discovered the change -- i.e., when the hardening
problems started showing up -- they once again went searching for a suitable
material, coming up with Eksaine, the material they currently use. (At least
this is what was being used while I was there.) At last report, this
material was quite successful.

Regards,

Del