At 8:07 PM -0700 10/27/00, piano lover88 wrote: >A fellow tech tells me that he is NOT using snuggles any more, (for >voicing) because he strongly believes that it damages/ruins hammers >in the long run. He now uses denatured alcohol and water.. That's his opinion, What's yours. Mine is that each has its place. Water-based expansion of felt masses (using either alcohol or steam temperatures to overcome the surface tension obstacle) works great with felt densified by hot pressing or by work hardening (heavily played hammers). When the fibers in a felt mass have been encased and/or glued together by reinforcers, Snuggles seems to be able to do what water cannot: loosen the grip of these reinforcers. In any case, if one is not caution about any of these treatments, hammers can get ruined. Which is why I have carried forward the lesson I learned with lacquer: pick two or three adjacent notes in a region with identical tone, treat one of them with a measured dose, observe the response, and treat the rest based on that reaction. Like pickling out a drill bit for unknown pinblock material (and as far as I'm concerned, the combination of any fresh set of hammers and the rest of the piano is an unknown), finding your way around one selected samples cuts back on the number of hammers you'll inadvertently mess up. Bill Ballard RPT NH Chapter "There are fifty ways to screw up on this job. If you can think of twenty of them, you're a genius......and you aint no genius" ...........Mickey Rourke to William Hurt, in "Body Heat", discussing arson.
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