Will Truitt wrote: 4) If I stroke across the bass strings with the dampers on the bass strings, there is a fairly prominent hangover of the string excitation before it dies away – not unlike doing the same thing on across the bass strings of a spinet Dale Erwin Wrote: One last thing. Look at the length of dampers on the old models. Compare it the new. The amount of felt used in the past & forever was quite modest & were cut to very precise & specific lengths. I believe it was to avoid nodal points of contact in the bass & to also minimize the whooshing. Less felt less whooshing. This require cutting the new felts to length. --- Hi Will, Lots of good advice this time around, some of which will surely help me and others down the road as well. So, thanks, folks! I want to elaborate on Dale Erwin's excellent suggestion that perhaps too-long felt segments are falling upon nodal points along the string's speaking length. A test for this would be to pluck, strum, or otherwise excite each individual string with the dampers down (touching the strings). If you hear the sound of the fundamental, or a fairly even distribution of harmonics, you may be OK nodally. However, if you hear one particular partial jumping out, then one of the two felts may be impinging on a nodal point. Sometimes, shortening this felt may improve the damping for that note (by concentrating that half of of the damper mechanism's weight/resistance on a non-nodal area). Other times, sliding the felt forward or backward slightly may help, if the felt is already on the short side and there is sufficient room under the damper head. Will Truitt wrote: 7) If I tap on the bass plate struts, they ring for 1 to 2 seconds. I can feel them vibrate when the pedal thumps. I believe that someone posted here or published in the journal about a home-made plate strut stiffener (basically a stick wedged between the struts). You could fabricate such a thing. I never have. If I were to make one, though, it would probably be a stick with two buckskin- lined "upside down U's" on the ends, both of which would be fitted at the extremity with a threaded hole for a stud/knob tightener. Hope that's clear enough, and you may be able to come up with something easier or more elegant in any case.... Joe DeFazio Pittsburgh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20081229/a99ecb3e/attachment.html>
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