Pinball

[Dean May]

I'll be very curious to see how you redesign the steep draft in the bass. 

Dean

Dean May             cell 812.239.3359 

PianoRebuilders.com   812.235.5272 

Terre Haute IN  47802


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Ron Nossaman
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 11:26 PM
To: Pianotech
Subject: Pinball


An interesting afternoon tearing this Knabe down. Watching the 
tuning pins come out, I got to wondering why there looked like 
different sizes, and mic'd some of them. I have 2/0 at 2-1/4, 
4/0, at 2-1/4 and 2-3/8, 5/0 at 2-1/4, 2-3/8, and 2-1/2, and 
6/0 at 2-3/8. I've likely missed a couple of lengths of 3/0 
there somewhere as well, since I didn't mic the whole set. If 
there was ever an "Always Replace the Block" poster child, 
this is the very guy. Poor thing.

Also, I wish I'd had one of the "Throw a few more twists on 
the bass strings, to revitalize the suckers folks" here to 
disarm some of the bear traps I ran into. Nearly lost an arm 
on a couple of them, and had to pry more than a dozen up off 
the hitch with a screwdriver. For the record - they weren't 
revitalized. The bass sounded universally, if not uniformly 
wretched. And if you looked up killer octave, you might have 
found mention of this piano as a definitive example. One of 
the more dramatic cases I've heard. That, of course, wasn't 
the result of past creative maintenance, rather the built in 
self destruct - like the bridge caps, but was impressive 
enough to merit mention. While I was whacking on the thing 
prior to tear down, my wife came out from the house to 
complain about the tone.

The current owner has had the piano for maybe twenty years. 
The player was dead when he bought it, and the piano  has had 
nearly nothing done to it since he bought it, so it's been 
like this for a very long time. He's looking forward to 
hearing it play again. Me too.
Ron N