Broadwood And Sons questions

[John Delacour]

At 14:48 -0500 9/1/08, Phil Bondi wrote:

>I have come in contact with a woman who wants to 'fix' her Broadwood 
>Cottage Piano. This is my first look at a birdcage-type of 
>configuration.
>
>She wants it tuned and possibly replace the dampers.
>
>What is the proper procedure for tuning these types of pianos? Is 
>there a agreeable reference (A=430?) that I should be shooting for?

Why not 440?  I haven't a Broadwood here to look at, but you can be 
pretty sure the strings will be well below the tensile limit of the 
wire at A=440 and that it might well have been tuned to military 
pitch A=452 during its life.

What is the age of the piano?  It's unusual for a Broadwood to have 
overdampers.

The 1881 Kirkman "Cottage Overstrung" I have just got has 10 single 
covered strings and 17 covered bichords in the overstrung section, 
then has plain wire bichords up to note 53 and trichords from there 
to the top.  The plain bichords are at about 150 lbs and the 
trichords are at about 125 lbs. when up to pitch.  I tuned it 
yesterday with no difficulty and all the strings are original. It's a 
very expressive little piano, cottage or no.

Over-dampers have a bad name because they have usually never been 
either regulated or teased and are simply not working.  Once they are 
properly regulated to begin moving at half-blow, to meet the string 
at the right place and at the right angle, they are pretty effective 
except in the low bass.  If they haven't had things spilled on them, 
you'd probably do better not to recover them.  Most overdampers have 
end-grain felt and you can just fluff this back into shape or clean 
the felts with a compressed air gun.  Refit and regulate them one at 
a time so you can see what you're doing and get at them with the 
bending tools.  Make sure to get the slap rail as low as you can, as 
you would on a grand.

JD