I thought I'd "modernize" the system and put on a wood dowel and I-don't-remember-what-brand of pre-made dampers. The problem I had was that I used the original Chickering damper levers along with the original, rather light, damper springs. Initially I considered replacing the springs with something heavier but for reasons I no longer remember that didn't seem feasible. Besides I liked how the action felt with the light springs. I didn't weigh the original brass parts and compare them with the wood parts I used. But the brass parts were quite a bit heavier. Working on the assumption that Chickering actually understood a bit about what he was doing I decided to go back to the original brass parts which, if memory serves, were some different than those shown in the pictures that started this thread. The difference in damping efficiency was dramatic. With the heavier damper heads and backplates the things damped just fine with the original light springs. I had a similar experience when we were building our upright. The original Renner damper system simply didn't work no matter how heavy a spring we put on the things. When we switched to brass damper barrels through the bass we were able to drop way back on the spring tension and still have good damping efficiency. ddf Delwin D Fandrich Piano Design & Fabrication 6939 Foothill Court SW, Olympia, Washington 98512 USA Phone 360.515.0119 Cell 360.388.6525 del at fandrichpiano.com ddfandrich at gmail.com -----Original Message----- From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Ron Nossaman Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2012 11:27 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Chickering damper blocks On 12/22/2012 1:09 PM, Susan Kline wrote: > Heavy enough that he had to put them back on to get the upright to > damp properly. > (Is there another valid measure?) Odd, I can't hear it from here any more than I can weigh it, and I seem to remember at least a couple of wood backed dampers that worked quite well. So I don't have enough information to know. Ron N
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