Floyd Doing a lot of things to one octave might not be in the best interest for the customer. Instead of noticing all the things you have done, he might be disappointed that there is a difference in just that one octave. When I've had a few extra minutes, I've spent it doing the same thing to the whole action, like lost motion, or let off, or leveling a few keys. etc. It's one thing to maybe do one thing if you have the time. But what you're describing is several hours of work, for which you should be compensated. If anything, do what you did to one or two keys, and ask the customer if he can feel/hear a difference. Then, sell him on a complete action regulation job. Willem (Wim) Blees, RPT Piano Tuner/Technician 94-505 Kealakaa Str. Mililani, Oahu, HI 96789 808-349-2943 www.Bleespiano.com Author of: The Business of Piano Tuning available from Potter Press www.pianotuning.com -----Original Message----- From: Floyd Gadd <fg at floydgadd.com> To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Thu, Jan 21, 2010 7:51 pm Subject: [pianotech] Incremental Upright Regulation List, I usually consider a basic tuning to be a 90 minute call, since in our Manitoba climate, even the pianos I tune annually seem to need some pitch adjustment before I can fine tune. Today I ran into an exception--a piano I had pitch raised and followed up a month later last winter. Today's tuning took 45 minutes. Since the customer rather likes his piano, but his partner is suggesting they should have a different one, I decided to use my remaining time to do something about its rather unfortunate state of regulation. I focused on the first octave above the tenor break (B2-B3), refining the key leveling, increasing the dip to 10 mm, setting the letoff, adjusting hammer blow to 1 3/4 inches by shimming behind the hammer rest rail felt (just the one octave), taking up lost motion and setting the checking. I didn't get around to adjusting damper timing. Since the customer left the house shortly after I started tuning, I called him later, explaining what I'd done. I let him know that if having that octave out of sync with the rest of the piano was a problem, I could easily pull the shims and readjust the capstans to make things more consistent. He was happy, however, to check out the results of the work, and to consider more work next time. Having read Bill Gagnon's article on the full service tuning appointment in the January journal, and Barbara Richmond's contribution a few months back, I'm interested to know how others on this list might be facing the task of bring a piano that is badly out of regulation back to where it needs to be . . . in 30 minute installments. It occurred to me as I struggled to set let-off that a useful "first installment" in the whole process might be sliding out the let-off rail, steaming/ironing the punchings, then quickly setting let-off for the whole scale. I've figured out a method, based on Spurlock's article in the Tech Exam Source Book, of referencing letoff to the bottom of the string cut, so that my work won't be undone when I get around to reshaping the hammers. The only hesitation I have with this approach is the fact that the customer doesn't see really noticeable improvement in the feel of the piano from this first installment, and noticeable change is a powerful selling tool for future work. Comments? Floyd Gadd Manitoba Chapter -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100122/c59c3044/attachment-0001.htm>
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