Wapin revisited

[John Delacour]

At 4:54 pm -0600 12/8/06, Cy Shuster wrote:

>Why the zig-zag on the bridge, anyway?  Why not a half-round with a 
>single bridge pin?

Many 'baby grands' over here have only a single pin on the bass 
bridge, and to conteract the side draft on the bridge about half the 
strings splay right to the hitch-plate and half to the left.

One of the most interesting arrangements I've seen recently was on a 
5ft Petersen (Denmark) double overstrung grand with a tremendous bass 
sound for such a small piano.  Into the bass bridge were screwed 
square steel pillars about 6 x 6mm, threaded at the bottom.  Since 
there are two levels of strings on the bridge crossing over each 
other at an angle, the pillars for the lowest strings are taller.  A 
slot is cut in the pillar at an downward angle to the speaking length 
and it is the acute angle at the front of the slot that serves to 
terminate the speaking length.  The lower plane of strings are, so 
far as I remember, about 15mm above the wood of the bridge and the 
higher plane about 25mm.  Incidentally there was no difficulty in 
tuning the piano after a full internal rebuild.

JD