Steinway Old Action Picture [was Steinway action noise]

[John Delacour]

I've found a lithograph of the old action drawn by Steinway about 
1880 and have done my best to overlay it with vectors.  So far as I 
can tell, the drawing is pretty accurate since my real dimensions map 
onto the image pretty well.

It's no good looking at this file in Internet Explorer or Safari 2. 
You will need Opera or Firefox or Safari 3.

<http://pianomaker.co.uk/images/steinway_action.svg>

This is work in progress and does not contain many dimensions. 
Unfortunately SVG is also work in progress and a lot of browsers 
don't do it properly.

Note that the line from the balance to the lever centre crosses the 
touching profiles when the system is _at_rest_ and not at half-blow. 
As I have said before, this is correct to my way of thinking and 
leads to the least wear.

In the lithograph the shank length seems to be 128mm, which rather 
knocks on the head my assertion that it would be most likely 130 or 
just possibly 125 but not something in between!

The difference between 23mm centre to rail-midpoint on the old flange 
and 24mm on later flanges can be allowed for by packing the top of 
the lever flange, as has been discussed, without affecting much the 
behaviour of the action, but there is no way a 10mm roller can be 
used rather than the original 9mm roller without severely interfering 
with the geometry of the action.

JD