Thanks for responses about humidity, specifically regarding issues with the Baldwin I mentioned. Now I've another question for which I'd appreciate help. The same church has a Shigeru Kawai, and two Estonia grands. There was a major issue with tuning pin torque on one Estonia, which has been resolved, but Mr. Josh Foust raised another issue. He was fairly strong in his assertion that humidity be kept between 50-57% for the Estonias. This can only be managed with DC units, as they have AC running in the major music centers of the church at all times and it is running in low-to-mid 60%. My question(s) regard humidity in general. If humidity levels are maintained at a consistent level "x", how crucial that they be kept at a particular "x"? How does that significantly affect things like integrity of pinblock and bridge pin holes being damaged by expanding/contracting of metal against wood? Is there any general consensus about how much the piano's life will be shortened because of humidity caused wood deterioration either by crushing fibers, leaving looser tuning pins, and/or cracks in bridges? On a distantly related matter, I tuned, yesterday, a Wurlitzer spinet which went through hurricane Ike. The piano is about half a mile from the Gulf of Mexico, and had water (Gulf water being salt water) sitting in it for weeks. This was the first tuning since the hurricane. I opened up the bottom and told the owner that I was afraid everything inside was going to break. The water line was immediately obvious, as rust was the order of the day everywhere in the bottom of the piano. The bridge apron had one crack in it, and there were some small cracks in the treble bridge (not the bass one). The bass strings had changed timbre, but with one exception were not dead, and I braved pulling it up within 10 cents of pitch and the whole thing held with some stability. At the beginning of the tuning A4 was 25 cents low. These people couldn't afford a new piano, so it was a very pleasant experience to have strings hold. They had an old DC unit in it without the box. Thankfully, I think, it wasn't working, and would have been grounded out during the most needed drying time.... Thanks for input Les Bartlett Piano Service -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100617/abf0c8ab/attachment.htm>
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