poor quality yamahas?

[John Ross]

Hi Tom,
In the 70's, Yamaha ran into a problem with pianos shipped to Canada,
and probably some parts of the US as well.
They were building all their pianos with wood of the same moisture
content.
Some ended up with loose pins, they would ask the techs who queried
the problem, to repin the piano, and they would supply the pins and
pay them. They did not check on the tech qualifications, and some
techs, were sloppier than others. So your piano could have been
repinned. That doesn't explain the bass string windings being uneven,
unless the tech was really sloppy, and mixed up the bass strings,
while repinning.
This is about the time they started to manufacture specific pianos for
North America, with a different moisture content in the wood to
alleviate this problem.
This is the same problem that the Grey/Wet pianos, are having now. But
the problem shows up more in some areas than others. So it isn't just
sour grapes, that they complain about these imports, they had the
problem before, which they solved.
I repinned a grand at a University for them in '76, so I am going by
that experience.
Regards
John M. Ross
Windsor, Nova Scotia.
jrpiano@win.eastlink.ca
----- Original Message -----
From: <Tvak@aol.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 9:24 AM
Subject: poor quality yamahas?


| I've been tuning two Yamahas for a couple of years now, and I
started to
| notice a couple of things which surprise me.  The grand, about a 7
footer,
| has string coils which are completely inconsistent.  Some tuning
pins have 4
| coils around them, others have one or two, many are on angles.  It
doesn't
| appear to have been restrung, and the strings with poor or few coils
look no
| newer than their neighbors with three or four coils.
|
| The console has bichords which have great variation in their wrapped
lengths.
|  The left bichord may have an inch of naked steel by the agraffe and
the
| right 1/4".  This makes for a poor unison.  Again, it doesn't appear
to have
| been restrung, nor do the mismatches look like replacement strings
because
| they both are the same in shininess, dullness.
|
| These pianos both date back to the 70s.  Did Yamaha improve their
quality
| control at some point?  Were earlier Yamahas plagued with shoddy
workmanship
| as apparently exhibited by these two examples?
|
| Or is there another explanation?
|
| Tom S
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