A chance to rant a bit.....

[Ron Nossaman]

> Can any of those who've been around awhile.....................  make 
> some cogent comments about how much sooner a piano with radical seasonal 
> pitch swings will have the pin block go bad than in a very stable 
> environment?  

I've seen a rebuilt grand with a multilam maple block that 
went from snap-crack Baldwin tight, to too loose to hold in 
three years in a radiator heated school building. The action 
didn't do much better.


>I do a school district- getting to be a drag- but they 
> recently have been turning all climate control off for nights, weekends, 
> and of course holidays.  One school having had an infestation of mold 
> last year, these pianos which were 5-15 cents sharp in the fall and now 
> up to 40 cents flat.  NO I am not that bad a tuner!    But today I tuned 
> one of those horrible things, a GH1, and the tuning pins were so loose I 
> could move them easily with small finger- and this piano is no more than 
> five years old.    I want to have some information for the school 
> district in this regard.    

First off, they would have had a better piano (or a couple) 
buying a P-22 instead of a GH-1. That was nearly as bad a 
choice as they could have made.


>OTOH, I tend to like a certain climate 
> control unit which uses a cheap cool mist humidifier, and I know that if 
> they put these things in a school, each will be stolen in short 
> order.....    I've put the drying part on several pianos, but this year 
> because they have gone to such ridiculous lengths to dry out the air, 
> the bars seldom work. Instead, the pianos are impossibly flat.
>  
> So, thoughts would be appreciated.
> les bartlett

It's impossible, sorry. It costs a lot more than they have to 
adequately climate control the facility, assuming you can get 
even the concept of humidity control across to anyone. 
Anything dumping humidity into the air on a room by room basis 
will, like you said, either be stolen, destroyed, allowed to 
run dry, or unplugged. If it's a forced air system, it's 
useless anyway, as the humidified air will be replaced 
immediately by dry air from the rest of the building. Look at 
it this way. If 300 breathing and sweating bodies aren't 
producing enough humidity to do anything, your little room 
unit won't either. The only hope I see is full Dampp-Chaser 
systems, and the only times I've seen these work is when the 
facility has a full time employee, part of who's job it is to 
keep the systems serviced. Otherwise it's a "not my job" 
category.

So the only solution I see working is the one I see working 
everywhere. Exclude consideration for the pianos from all 
decisions regarding climate control, and use the money saved 
by turning off the system evenings, weekends, and holidays to 
replace the pianos every few years with the cheapest most 
disposable model they can find. Tuning stability has no place 
in the equation, since all possibility of that is effective 
eliminated by the above conditions. No one cares when the 
tarantula in the science class dies over Christmas break when 
they turn off the heat, so they aren't going to care about the 
pianos until replacement time. Meanwhile, learn to love CA, 
and plan on making 30c or more pitch changes in at least part 
of the scales of all of the pianos twice a year. You likely 
won't change anything, so you might just as well generate some 
income from the situation.

When you shout down a hole and don't even get an echo, it's 
time to find other sources of amusement.
Ron N