miscast Steinway plate

[Allen Wright]

I don't know if anyone other than me finds this interesting, but I  
thought I'd report on the findings of my diggings: like a dog with a  
bone, I couldn't rest with uncertainty, and so decided to take the  
question about how my 1927 Steinway M ended up cast incorrectly as a  
model O on the plate (discussed in a recent thread) right to the  
source, the Hamburg factory.

I described the piano and its confusing model designation to Ulrich  
Erhard of C & A at Steinway London, who said he had never heard of  
this phenomenon. He straightaway called the Hamburg factory to  
inquire about it, and was told that they had indeed miscast a number  
of these pianos; the entire plate pattern must have been carved with  
the wrong letter designation, and multiple piano plates produced from  
it.

It's interesting to consider the various scenarios of how this might  
have happened, but my favorite is the one my wife imagines; a usually  
skilled and reliable pattern maker had the pattern almost finished,  
went to lunch, had one pale ale too much, returned, and merrily  
carved an O into the pattern instead of M. Nobody caught the mistake  
(maybe it had lost it's identifying paperwork), and the rest is history.

I suppose it's not that unlikely an occurrence. Haven't we all  
learned half of what we know through having done it wrong once or  
twice? This is a bit epic, though, having your mistake cast in iron.

249150 (serial # of Conrad Hoffsomer's piano with this "problem")  
minus 248042 (my piano's #) = 1,108 (!). I guess we can assume that  
there are quite a few of these pianos out there.

Here's to the charms of human error,

Allen Wright, RPT






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