The only broken plates I've seen (after the fact) were on Baldwins--two consoles and a Hamilton. Barbara Richmond, RPT near Peoria, Illinois ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Remillard" <anrpiano at gmail.com> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 3:42:33 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central Subject: Re: [pianotech] Brands prone to breaking plates Back to the list. 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090417/e9bbf67c/attachment.html>
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