Seasons greetings to all of my friends here! Many great suggestions were made to help Geoff's problem with a piano that is difficult to tune, but one line was not pursued. That is the tuning hammer technique used to tune this kind of piano. Please don't think that I assume you have poor technique; extreme pianos will sometimes require extreme techniques, not better ones, just different ones. Most of us develop a hammer technique that we pretty much use all of the time. Experienced tuners develop further techniques to tune different pianos, some consciously, others subconsciously. While we never like tuning pins that are too tight, this string rendering problem is more difficult. Daniel Bowman, RPT wrote a series of articles in the Journal in the early 1990s called "The Marshmallow Zone." He says "When you turn the pin but the string doesn't follow and you can't tell where the string tension is or whether the pin foot is in the correct position, that's the Marshmallow Zone." Daniel's articles are worth rereading. Ken Burton, RPT wrote a book called "Different Strokes" subtitled "Hammer Techniques for Piano Technicians". It is the only place I have seen twenty different techniques that have proved useful to many different technicians over the years. This book is available for $19.95 from Randy Potter, see http://www.pianotuning.com/products/books.htm. You say that you find pounding a lot helps to stabilize the pitch. If you find yourself moving the tuning pins after this and repeating, you know the pin wasn't in the right place to begin with. Coordinated pounding while turning the pin can help. There is simply too much material that could be covered here for me to try to write about it all. Some of the techniques in Burton's book that would apply to this type of piano include: "Change the Clock" which refers to the hammer position on the pin, "The Grand Heintzman Yank" which is a kind of jerk technique, "The Steady Pull" and "The Karate Chop" which need no further explanation. They would require a good reading, testing, and practice. I'm not sure if I'm saying too much or way too little, but it's all I have time for tonight. Have a wonderful and prosperous new year! Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net North Shore Chapter Bruce Dornfeld, RPT bdornfeld at earthlink.net 847-498-0379 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20081228/bfa677fb/attachment.html>
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