True -- and it is because this is where the real money is in spinet remanufacturing these are the kinds of things we try to keep secret! Don't ever tell anyone what you're doing! (Of course, there are those cynics who would say it's best to keep these projects secret because if anyone ever finds out what you are doing they'll be sending in the ex-wrestler types with the white coats and straps to have a chat with you; but what do they know?) As to your concerns: 1) I'd not worry about the removal of the original tone wood. It is common knowledge that tonewood does not even start to improve significantly until it is at least 100 years old. Indeed, I some surprised you don't already know this. As you are only removing half of aging time, the new tone wood will catch up in no time at all. There is another possibility: if you wanted to keep the authentic resonance of the hand-selected and processed Authentic Tone Spruce that was harvested from the 2,450 foot level of the west slope of Mt Olympus, you can probably slice the original in half and still have enough wood to make up a whole new soundboard. For true authenticity you could use the left over wood to make the new cutoff bars. This would have the advantage of matching the resonances of the new soundboard to those of the cutoff bars. 2) I realize that what I'm going to suggest was not invented--by Aeolian, to give full credit -- until the 1960s but...you might consider just spreading the damper pedal and the soft pedal apart some and installing a third pedal between them. The spring Aeolian used to support the middle pedal was probably proprietary but a technician of your skill and experience should be able to adapt a genuine custom-crafted Ace Hardware spring to serve a similar function; basically that of holding the pedal up to make it look like it was actually serving some useful function. ddf Delwin D Fandrich Piano Design & Fabrication 620 South Tower Avenue Centralia, Washington 98531 USA del at fandrichpiano.com ddfandrich at gmail.com Phone 360.736.7563 -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Nicholas Gravagne Sent: Saturday, January 29, 2011 3:18 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Terry's Comments<G> ... This kind of re-engineering is where the big money is in spinets. I have two concerns here: 1) such drastic surgery (especially removing the original tone-woods) might destroy the instrument's inherent beauty of tone thereby lessening its value, and 2) after all this work the piano will still have only two pedals --- I could never sell it ;-) As to "I really didn’t think there would be two of us .", I'm grinning as you surely know how profound and widespread your knowledge and influence has been. But as you mean to say that there may be only two of us crazy enough to re-engineer a lowly spinet, perhaps so ---- but when I actually do the work, there definitely will be one!
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