[pianotech] Moving the wippen heel--reposting with more photos and corrections

David Love davidlovepianos at comcast.net
Wed Jul 20 16:31:48 MDT 2011


I'm reposting this with a few more pictures through the entire process and
my spelling errors corrected. 

David Love
www.davidlovepianos.com


Had to relocate a set of wippen heels after moving the capstan.  Often I
just cover the entire heel with felt if there's a problem with the new
capstan position contacting the wooden edges of the heel.  In this case I
didn't want to do that so I wanted to figure out a way to remove the heel
and relocate it.  I could have just trimmed the entire heel off with a
bandsaw and then bought a new set of heels but preferred to try and salvage
what was there.  In this case I needed a 4 mm move.  I marked and drew a
line that distance from the original heels first for indexing the gluing of
relocated heel, you can see that a bit in the first photo.  Then to remove
the heel you first have to clamp the wippen in a vice.  I used some two
sided tape to attach these wooden strips so I could clamp that lower part of
the wippen without interference from the wider flanges and posts (second
photo).  To remove them I took a sharp chisel and ran it under the thin glue
bead at the edges--kind of rubbery stuff (third photo).  Then with a very
light tap on both sides of the heel it comes right off.  Safest to tap very
lightly just until you hear the joint break on one side and then switch to
the other side.  Didn't have any tear out on any of the removals as these
are mostly glued at the edges.  After the heel is removed I cut off the
nipple with a band saw--make sure you don't leave a high spot there, a bit
low is ok since the heel will be held in place by the outer portion.  A few
swipes over a sheet of sandpaper to clean it up and then glued it back in
place as pictured in the first photo.  I found the easiest way to work was
to flip the stack upside down and rotate it to a 45 degree angle (first
picture kind of gives you an idea) with the flange screws up so you could
just work across one at a time.  Use a short block on the end of the stack
to keep it in place.  Takes a couple of hours.  

BTW this was a early accelerated action Steinway (as you can tell probably).
A move to a 17 mm knuckle still left the ratio at about 6.1.  I wanted
something around 5.5

David Love
www.davidlovepianos.com

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