<html> <body> Julia - Your description of the symptoms remains a bit unclear.  Do you mean that if you were to sit down at the piano and play each note forcefully, once, that each would play, but if you were to do the same with a minimal force, it would not?  Or is it that a note, after being played softly once, will cheat when attempted again?   While Issac and David Stahl might be correct in assessing the jack pinning as the problem, it could also relate to key leveling, though the opposite to what you suggested.    If there is not enough (just enough) lost motion, the jack will not return under the butt on a slow (soft) release. Besides leveling, other possible contributing keyboard issues could be either excess friction or excess front weighting.  This could be further aggravated by tight wippin pinning, excess friction between jack top and butt leather, bad geometry of the butt profile,  incorrect thickness of butt cushion, or an imbalance between hammer return spring and jack spring.   I recall working on a small Steinway consol, some years ago, where the configuration of the lower butt geometry created the dilemma where, by the time I eliminated excess lost motion, the jack would not navigate over what appeared (to it) as an inverted speed bump. On the other hand, it might just be the jack pinning. Let us know. David Skolnik At 11:52 PM 11/22/2004 -0500, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Greetings,              Working on a Hamilton built by Baldwin studio upright today, I noticed that  on a reallly soft blow to the key, the jack wants to slip forward almost to the back of the catch's shank, instead of delivering the kick to the base of the hammer butt.              The customer complained that, on a soft blow the key wouldn't play and would sort of jam. Looking at this situation I saw that the jack would sometimes just slip out too much forward and not deliver its power. What would cause this? Could the keys not be levelled high enough? Julia Gottchall, Reading PA  </blockquote></body> </html>