Steinway Quality ?

[Richard Brekne]

jolly roger wrote:

> Hi Ric,
>            It will happen every time, when the factory does not address the
> friction, and fit issues before weight off.

Boy you got that one right.... I started the final run through this morning...
knew I was going to get into center pins..and ok.. the piano has been used a
lot for nigh on 20 years... but jimmenees holitos.. no pattern to anything...
ranged from 2 swings to 25... and that wasnt all... I found that the knuckles
had been glued on really sloppy... I mean I found like 10 of them that were so
far angled forward (ie towards the hammer) that takeing them off and glueing
them on straight gave me as much as 3 grams extra downweight.. if you have been
following the numbers on this you know I was going to need every gram of
downweight I could get as I was pushing the limit as to what lead I could take
out without getting into radical change in SW or moving the capstans. Grin...
you should see the pile of lead shavings I took out of this thing.

Any ways.. I am mostly done with it now... just have a bit of smoothing out
that has to do with hammer centers left.. about 25 left... then final
regulation and in she goes. Its coming out great. Dead on curves and DW starts
at 52 for four notes.. moves to 50 til about C4 then moves nicely over to
finish at 48. I have just spot checked UW and it looks to average around 25...
so that puts me in the 36 - 38 BW range... just what I wanted. I'll throw out
the numbers I have latter on this evening.

Golly... this one has been a real eye opener... I cant wait until a couple
proffessors I know get to try this out... I cant see how on earth I can miss on
this....grin

>
>  For run of the mill production give me a CNC weight off any day of the
> week. At least it ends up in the ball park.
> No doubt you will a great improvement.  As a crude rule of thumb, if a
> weight is more than an inch away from an adjacent key weight I start to
> look and question.  Mark the lead positions, pull the stack and check front
> weights. If they are close, I then recheck capstan and friction.
> Just my 2c worth
> Roger

--
Richard Brekne
RPT, N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway
mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no