David L said: < I felt they were both too hard but just wondered what others thought and what their experience was. Ditto. I did a couple of maple shoe jobs, and had to go back in and replace the shoes...I used basswood for home instruments the re-work . In order to avoid noise, the fit is so unforgiving with the maple its just saying "hit me" for no good reason. As Del said, there are plenty of softwood shoes out there whose service life was quite respectable...why set one's self up for re-work unnecessarily. If you are going to use maple, there needs to be a very shy 1mm contact depth at the hole/pin, and the hole/pin fit must not be the gravity sliding fit we are used to, but must be a tight no slop pivot. This creates secondary problems of its own: -if you do keyleveling with the stack on, raising the keys to add leveling punchings is really difficult, as you have to fight with the keys to raise them on the pins. -followup techs will see the tight balance fit, and mistake it for a problem. They will then ease the hole and wham-o, you've got a call back...I had this happen on one of the maple shoe jobs Not worth it on any level in my opinion. Interestingly, in chatting about this with a Boston tech responsible for BSO and institutional pianos, he went in and re-worked all his maple shoes for the above reasons, but also was unhappy with the poplar shoes...so now is using basswood, I believe. Jim Ialeggio -- Jim Ialeggio jim at grandpianosolutions.com 978 425-9026 Shirley Center, MA
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