old Kimball brass flange rail/damper lever removal

Thomas Cole tcole@cruzio.com
Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:04:42 -0800


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Tvak@aol.com wrote:

> List
>
> Two questions in one day!  Sorry to take up the bandwidth.
>
> The suspect: a family heirloom Kimball upright from the 1890/1900s. 
>
> The piano has a brass hammer/damper lever flange rail.  I know that 
> these can become brittle over time.


Tom

The one Kimball I worked on had broken a few of the flange rail fingers. 
I managed to find a tech who had the same piano somewhere in storage and 
was willing to send me the flange rails. Hopefully, your rails are still 
intact.

What I did was to anneal the brass rails before installing them in the 
piano. Having done experiments on annealed and untreated rails, I found 
that it helped to do the heat treating. The annealed brass was still 
tough enough to hold the parts and is much less prone to breaking. Just 
take a torch to each piece and heat until it glows a dull red. This can 
also be done on a gas stove. Use new butt plates when reassembling the 
action. Try not to overtighten the butt plates.

Tom Cole

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