Bridge Disaster- - Should be Bridge From Hell!!

[Susan Kline]

At 10:50 PM 8/1/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Ah, yes, Joe. There is more to report on this but whether I create a 
>living sculpture out of epoxy or actually cut a new bridge, there is 
>another nightmare looming ... This is going to totally screw up hammer and 
>damper alignment for 26 notes! I don't even know if the hammers will fit 
>and/or if I'll have to redrill those rails, too.
>
>Alan Barnard
>Salem, Missouri
>

Hey, Alan -- don't panic.

If you're willing to give up the aesthetics of it, you can get the thing 
quite functional without changing the hammer spacing, and without shaving 
it down to zip and putting on a new cap. A new cap would be _good_, of 
course, but for such an animal, people might not want to pay for it.

I've _been_ there, I've _done_ it, and my patient wasn't even Asian! It was 
a Baldwin-built spinet from the 1970's, with grossly excessive 
side-bearing, the bridge pin angles were all wrong, so that the pins didn't 
get support from the skinny little body of the bridge, and long parts of it 
had split from pin to pin. I even wrote this up, in a Journal article from 
Feb. 1998. It's (appropriately) entitled, "Bridge Confessions: Cobbles I 
Have Done on Pianos of No Commercial Value."

On mine, I decided that the bridge was too skinny, and I glued a hardwood 
slat to the bottom edge of it with epoxy. Then I drew my lines for where 
each string should go, using the monofilament between the front bridge pin 
and the hitch pin. At SOME POINT on that line, in this splintered miserable 
little excuse for a bridge, I found firm wood, and drilled for the rear 
bridge pin at a decent angle. The line of the row of rear bridge pins looks 
like nothing on earth, but it was fully functional. The extra mass from the 
slat even seems to have helped -- once I had the bass strings retrieved 
from their bundle and pulled up to pitch the tone sounded not just adequate 
-- it was GOOD, even ABOVE AVERAGE for this kind of little box.

There's even a confessional photograph of what the darned thing looked like 
when I was finished.

I did have decent string spacing from the front row of bridge pins, but you 
can get that by running monofilament fish line from the top bridge to the 
hitch pin. Draw a line across the bridge where it goes, then set the pins 
to either side of the line. Replace a sample string or two once you have 
bridge pins in the right place, with proper sidebearing, and check to be 
sure you've got them in line with hammers and dampers.

I finished the article by describing what our favorite Oregonian Curmudgeon 
(Joe Garrett) does to get epoxy into the splits around bridge pins. He uses 
heat, and the stuff just _slurps_ down exactly where he wants it to go. 
Very fun to watch.

Susan Kline