[pianotech] Schoenhut toy piano (somewhat OT)

David B. Stang stangdave at columbus.rr.com
Tue Jan 11 14:42:30 MST 2011


Hi,
I was given a little toy piano and I thought I would "restore"
it just for my own amusement. It has 12 metal bells, which sound
the major scale notes from A#5 to F7 (roughly). There is one
bell (D6) whose size appears to fit in the scale, but is way flat,
by almost an entire whole step.
I have seen orchestral bells which are tuned by drilling a
dimple in their center, so I thought I would be clever and drill
a small dimple in the bell to sharpen it. Well, instead of sharpening,
it went even flatter. (From about 975Hz to 950Hz, and
the target is 1100).
Can someone help me get my pea-brained head around the fact that
removing material from a bell would LOWER its pitch, where I would
have thought that removing material would make it lighter and more
flexible, and therefore RAISE the pitch.
Any ideas about what to do now? Drill the other 11?
Or, does anybody have a spare D6 metal bell lying around?
Thanks.

David B. Stang
Columbus



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110111/4f4bbfa3/attachment.htm>


More information about the pianotech mailing list

This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC