Mannino reamers

[John Delacour]

At 08:57 23/09/01 +0200, Isaac OLEG SIMANOT wrote:

>I have a set of broaches in a little black linen pouch. Are these yours ? the broaches are about 2' long , which I find a little short for me to burnish the bushing, but I have it with my tools,  For the shop I made long reamers with the long center pins we can find easily here in Paris. May be what is sold to us is old American Piano Supply stock , but I've find these I bought lately are better than some I had find 15 years ago, wich where too aggressive indeed.
>Beside, we use metric system for the pinning , the correspondence is not  optimal.
> 
>I always wondered how is the actual pinning system in USA.  I guess Kawai imported from Japan are in metric system, or are some made in the U.S. ?

I have always made my own broaches from piano wire.  The working length is about 15 cm (6") and I make an English (American) eye at the end to serve as the handle, usually whipping it round with some copper wire.  I grind the end to a finely tapering point and make this smooth.  To roughen the broach, I either roll it between an extremely fine file and flat block of hard wood, or stroke it with a rougher file using a slashing motion while rotating the broach, which is just as good.  The roughness of the broach can be reduced by running it through abrasive paper or increased by more rolling or stroking.

I like the broach to be so rough that it does its work with no less than six or seven passes through the bush; this way it is difficult to overdo the broaching.  While broaching I keep the broach as straight as possible, rotating it between my thumb and forefinger as I pass it back and forth in the bushing in order to avoid any possible ovalization.

For the wire, I need to be patient and wait till some old strings come my way that have non-standard diameters.  I then strip the copper winding off these and treasure the cores.  I number the broaches in 1/100 mm. such as 127, 130, 133 etc. and will use a broach a few hundredths smaller than the size of the new pin.

I use a mixture of American Schaff pins and Japanese pins from Danielsen in Copenhagen.  This gives me a very fine gradation of sizes and permits me to increase the size of the new pin by the very minimum necessary.  I have heard people talk of brass pins.  I have never seen such a thing and do not want to.  The Schaff pins I have are very smooth with a nice bullet-shaped end and are of solid German silver (nickel silver).  I think the Japanese pins are of nickel silver plated with nickel or perhaps silver.  They are whiter than the Schaff pins and equally smooth.  I had very bad experience years ago with English pins and German pins and have never used them since.

JD