[pianotech] Brands prone to breaking plates

Andrew Remillard anrpiano at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 13:42:33 PDT 2009


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J. Bauer open face  1910's
Bechstein same period
Weber 11910's open face

I am starting to see a pattern here. I have found four different type of
harp breaks. The open face harps tend to have too little iron through the
pin field and fail often across what little strut material they have.

Struts often break because of poor factory setting, improper "rebuilding",
and tooners who have strange notions about using nose bolts to adjust
voicing. (I am not making this up!)

Pin field failure. Since the stress here shouldn't be that severe I would
imagine most are caused by casting problems or a very poorly fit pin block
which led to more pressure on the harp from the tuning pins than should have
been present.

And the finale one is the treble hitch pin field breaking off. This tends to
be the loudest and most frightening. I had this happen once while tuning a
spinet. I had just pulled my head up from looking at something under the key
bed when it happened. As others have said, it does get your attention.
-- 
Andrew Remillard
ANRPiano.com
2211 Curtiss St.
Downers Grove, IL  60515
630-852-5058
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