Repinning flanges: Unusual discovery and solution

[David Love]

Found an interesting thing today.  Went to tune a S&S B for the first time
and found the action clickety clacking all over the place.  Pulled that
action to check the hammer glue joints and pinning.  Glue joints were fine
so I took off a hammer/shank/flange assembly to check the pinning.  Swung
the flange and I think it would still be swinging if I hadn't stopped it. 
Eyeballed the center pin as I rotated the flange and noticed that the pin,
instead of rotating in the bushing, didn't move.  I popped out the center
pin which came out with some difficulty.  Testing the fit through the
wooden eye, the pin literally fell through of its own weight.  The fit in
the bushing, on the other hand, was so tight, I was unable to reinsert it
by hand.  As it turns out, the action had been repinned fairly recently. 
Unfortunately, they got it backwards and had all the centers fitting quite
snugly in the bushings and rotating quite freely in the eye.  The flanges
were certainly free, and also quite noisy.  

In the process of repinning the action using broaches, I found that the
roughened part of the broach kept clogging with felt which reduced it's
cutting efficiency.  I discovered that putting a drop of Protek on the
bushing before inserting the broach seemed to speed up the cutting action
of the broach as well as prevent the roughened area of the broach from
clogging with felt.  I went through the action quite quickly, repinned the
whole set of flanges and only at the end began to wonder if using Protek
for this purpose might, for reasons unbeknownst to me, create problems
later on.  I couldn't imagine why it might, but, admittedly, paranoid
fantasies did begin to creep in.  Anyone else use this method?  And have
you found any problems, or benefits?


David Love
davidlovepianos@earthlink.net