Baldwin vertical hitch pin on Chickering

[pianoguru at cox.net]

The choice to put Chickering on the fallboard of these models was a marketing decision, but these models were my very first venture into design work.  At the time, Baldwin was seeking to produce a small grand that could compete at the price-point of the Asian small grands, then fairly new to the US market.

In my comments about vertical hitch pins, it was not my intent to warn field techs away from messing with the bearing setting with this type of hitch pin.  On the contrary, I would invite you to give it a try.  Just don't go wild with it.  A very subtle change can make a big difference.

When I was at Baldwin, I found the vertical hitch pins to be a perfect laboratory for experimenting with downbearing.  You can get immediate results from many changes you might choose to test.  My initial expectation was that one would have to make rather small changes over a wide range to effect the loading of the soundboard enough to change the attack/sustain characteristics.  To my surprise, I found that making a slight change to the strings of only one note could make a noticeable change in that note, without effecting its neighbors much.  It's much more a local effect than a general one.  I cannot explain why this is; this was just my observation.

Frank Emerson