[pianotech] Schoenhut toy piano (somewhat OT)

[Ryan Sowers]

The "bells" are those hard metal rods right? I've tuned several of these
types of toy pianos (an eccentric artist put on a toy piano recital (with
three tuned together!) downtown several years ago.

I found the most efficient way to raise the pitch was to use a heavy duty
cut-off wheel in a Dremmel tool and carefully slice 1/32"-1/16" off the
end.

If you go too far and want to make it flat, take a piece of music wire about
1/2 inch or so and use wire bending pliers to make a coil that will fit
tight around the end of the tine. Then you can tune the tine by moving the
coil up and down it, basically like a Fender Rhodes.

I tried adding solder to the tines, too, but that was an exercise in
frustration.

Have fun!

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:42 PM, David B. Stang
<stangdave at columbus.rr.com>wrote:

>  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
>
>
>
>


-- 
Ryan Sowers, RPT
Puget Sound Chapter
Olympia, WA
www.pianova.net
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