Inconsistent front rail pin size.

[Andrew and Rebeca Anderson]

Dave,
Actually is is a rebadged Donbei with very loose keys.  (The other 
one had tight keys and eased nicely.)  0.132 to 0.137 on the front 
rail pins.  The center rail pins were all pretty close to 0.136.

I'm planning to use the Spurlock cauls to do this with mortice 
sizing.  I was wondering if I'd end up with some loose keys.

Andrew Anderson

At 04:36 PM 9/11/2006, you wrote:
>Andrew:
>
>I'm going to guess that this is a fairly new NY S&S with (nominally)
>0.125" front rail pins.  They do vary.  Apparently the supplier for this
>size pins is not very consistent.  I just got a 7/8 keyboard for the
>school and the black keys have 0.125" pins and the white keys 0.146".  I
>asked David why he used different sizes and he said that the blacks on
>the 7/8 keys are so narrow that the .125s leave more wood for the
>mortise but that the .125 pins he could get were so inconsistent that he
>didn't want to use them on the whites.  A local S&S tech told me that
>this is what they are getting on the new pianos now and that they do
>vary a lot!
>
>dave
>
>David M. Porritt
>dporritt at smu.edu
>-----Original Message-----
>From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On
>Behalf Of Andrew and Rebeca Anderson
>Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 10:58 AM
>To: Pianotech List
>Subject: Inconsistent front rail pin size.
>
>I'm looking at rebushing keys on a piano and I'm up against pin
>sizing inconsistencies.  The center rail pin size was consistent on
>the few samples I checked.  The front rail pin size varied 5
>thousandths when checking just six pins.  Is this type of
>inconsistency typical for front rail pins or would I be saving myself
>a lot of grief by replacing all of them?
>
>Andrew Anderson