Ah, someone has written Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!! (I love it, what an invitation!!) I'm using a different type face for interspersed comments ... On 1/22/2011 4:57 AM, Terry Farrell wrote: >> Oh, the note you fix will be just fine. But since it was loose from >> cracks down below in the first place,the bigger pin will spread the >> cracks and the neighboring notes will be toast. > > The pinblock is cracked? How do you know? Yes, I agree this might be > the case, but IMHO it is at least as likely, if not more so, that the > tuning pin hole has simply enlarged from pinblock shrinking and > swelling and perhaps pin friction over the many years. In that case, > the bigger pin should work fine and not affect neighboring pins. The pinblock is cracked ... well, one can guess. Do you think that the tuning pin hole can enlarge from pinblock shrinkage far enough that it can't be tuned, yet the wood can avoid having cracks and delaminations? Have you ever seen firewood which sat and dried out? It cracks ... you can tell how dry it is by how much it has cracked. And if the pinblock is miraculously not cracked, but is dry and old and fragile, guess what shoving a bigger pin into it is going to do? [CRACK] Have you ever driven in oversized pins and not had the neighboring notes loosen? I haven't. But then, it's been a long, long time since I've used anything except CA on loose pins. > >> Besides, the CA glue does wonders. And it's not that the pin is >> suddenly too small -- it's that the hole got too big. Exactly like >> stripped screw holes, with the same kind of drawbacks when putting in >> bigger pieces of metal instead of repairing the hole. > > Hold the phone here. I thought we had a cracked pinblock? Now the hole > has simply enlarged? And what pray-tell is fundamentally wrong with a > larger screw as a remedy for a stripped screw hole (as long as the > larger screw is large enough to bite into un-chewed-up wood)? > Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!! *;-)* GRIN!! There's a TREMENDOUS fundamental problem with stuffing a bigger or a longer or a bigger AND longer screw into a stripped hole! Screws go THROUGH other parts. That's why they are there, to hold other parts on. They need to pass freely through the other part. Get them too big, and they will seize in the other part. Then it will seem that the screw is tight, but it will be tight in the wrong part, and still loose in the stripped hole. Besides, the trouble is not that the screw is too small! The screw is still exactly the same size it always was. The trouble is that the hole is too large! It is the hole which has changed, so it is the hole which needs fixing. Besides, if you fix the hole, you already have the right screw and don't have to supply one. Plus it will still match the others. Years and years ago, Jeff Hickey wrote a very helpful post on the list to people talking about elaborate plugging procedures for dowels inside Steinway action rails which no longer were able to hold flange screws properly. He said, 'You guys are working way too hard!' and then he talked about using a strip of buckskin soaked in white glue and putting that in the hole (with none sticking out the top). He had a somewhat careful procedure for determining how big the strip should be, and for making sure that the screw didn't shove the leather ahead of itself, and for making sure that the glue and leather were somewhat hardened and shaped before reassembling the parts. I dispensed with some of that (sorry, Jeff), and used the leather and white glue thing for numerous enlarged holes, from the tiny continuous hinge holes of grand lids to the massive lyre screw holes of cheap grands. I used everything from tiny strips of buckskin so small that one used tweezers to pick them up to thick hunks of shoe leather which had to be carved with a knife. I very seldom had failures of any kind, and some of these repairs I visited years later and found them still in good form. The squishy glue-wet leather forms new threads around the screws, and then the threads harden rock-hard. White glue never (or almost never) grabs on metal hard enough to seize a screw, unlike CA or epoxy. Wet leather stretched over a wooden frame and allowed to dry made shields in the Middle Ages. Wet leather which has dried is tremendously tough, so it essentially rebuilds the threads in the holes so that the screws can be taken in and out just like when they were new. The white glue also gloms together the splinters and sawdust in the holes, so that the stripping stops. This idea has served me very well, and compared with jamming a too-large screw into a stripped hole and waiting for it, in turn, to either jam in the other part or strip out itself in due course, I think that mending the hole is the way to go. <smile> Susan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110122/c2b9458f/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC