I prefer to leave the pin in a neutral setting with the smallest amount of pitch manipulation as possible. When I'm through, if I bounce the hammer lightly back and forth on a the same plane as the pin turns, the pin shouldn't move. In fact when in doubt as to a pin being settled, I find that smaller and smaller back and forth bumps until there is virtually no movement at all will tell you if the pitch will remain stable. I prefer to pull the pin up to the target pitch and stop (not going beyond) with pressure exerted on the pin to offset the torque so that once the pitch gets to where you want it the relaxing of forward and downward pressure on the pin offsets the release of pin torque and the net effect is zero-the pitch doesn't move. No pulling past pitch and pounding it back down. That's less stable as it just creates a poorly distributed string segment equilibrium as a starting point. If the pitch is sharp to begin with then you have to decide to first lower the pitch and come from underneath or to nudge the pitch downward. If you nudge it downward then your final test must be a slight tug toward the sharp side to see if the pitch won't go back sharp and to make sure that the pin isn't left with pitch lowering torque that will relax and pull the pitch sharp. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com From: Thomas Cole [mailto:tcole at cruzio.com] Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2010 10:32 PM To: David Love; Pianotech Subject: Re: [pianotech] How come? On 10/23/10 3:59 PM, David Love wrote: What do you mean by setting the pins "heavily or lightly" This is like trying to put into English how to tie a shoe. But I might hazard a theory about my hammer technique. Heavily-set pin: the string is pulled above pitch liberally and worked back down such that not only the twist is removed from the pin but some additional twist is added to leave the pin almost wanting to pull the string back sharp. This twist opposes heavy playing wanting to pull slack out of the tuning pin segment. If the note rises after some time, then I would say that the pin was "over set." Lightly-set pin: The string is pulled above pitch more conservatively and after settling, the pin is left in a more or less relaxed state, as if to anticipate only the stresses of diurnal temp/humidity changes. To use another's terminology which never did quite catch on: it depends on where you leave the tuning pin in the "marshmallow zone." Tom Cole -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101023/c357196e/attachment.htm>
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