At 1:38 PM +0200 8/28/03, Richard Brekne wrote: >This thingy about plate height being the determinant for capstan >placement has been vaguely put up a few times in the past couple >years and I have yet to get a finger on exactly how that works out. >Just what, step by step proceedure do factories use to get from ><<plate height>> (over keybed ?) to capstan placement ? It's not the plate height, rather the front to back location of the plate cause the problem. Apparently the method used by both Steinway factories to locate the block on the inside of the rim results in wide variations in block width. This is witnessed in the sometimes 1/2" range in thickness of the felt stuffed between the back flange of the plate and the inside of the front stretcher (arising as it will from front-to-back motion in the location of plates from piano to piano). If in your part of the world, you see more Hamburg than NY Steinways, you may not run into actions disadvantaged by this phenomenon. The long-standing explanation for the difference between the two factories, in action set-up resulting from this, runs like this. In Hamburg, the top action and the keyboard are indexed together, and when #88 Strike wants to move inwards because of a wider block, the action and keyboard both move deeper into the action cavity together, to follow strike #88. Because they move together, the rep cushions location above the keyboard (and thus the key ratio)remains undisturbed. In NY, the keyboard is indexed to the arms of the case (fixed regardless of where the block may put the plate in any given piano), and the top action is indexed to Strike #88. On a piano with fat stretcher felt, the action moves into the action cavity while the keyboard stays put. The cap line is indexed downwards from the rep cushion, which in this case would be moving (with the action) away from the keyboard balance pins, thus increasing the KR and FWs. Some five years ago, NY Steinway announced that they had solved what was an inconsistency in KRs from piano to piano (a problem which Hamburg never had), and from what I've seen, they actually have. They never described it as a problem related to stretcher felt thickness, but that's where they had to have fixed it. In the procedure by which the plate settles in, front-to-back, while fitting it to a pinblock already glued into the rim. As near as I can tell, Steinway is the only factory which had this particular problem. (That is, among those who should know better.) Bill Ballard RPT NH Chapter, P.T.G. "No one builds the *perfect* piano, you can only remove the obstacles to that perfection during the building." ...........LaRoy Edwards, Yamaha International Corp +++++++++++++++++++++
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