<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>RE: Steinway action noise</title></head><body> <div>At 17:28 -0500 18/11/07, Greg Newell wrote:</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>John,</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite >           <span ></span>     Awesome graphics! How do you do that?</blockquote> <div><br></div> <div>SmileLab <http://www.satimage.fr/software/en/index.html></div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>P.S. along with other disparities I see the core to hammer flange center is slightly different too!</blockquote> <div><br></div> <div>16.2 rather than 16.  Why Renner use this dimension I have no idea.  I bought Renner for this job because I don't like Abel's shanks, which I find to be poorly finished and with bad grain direction.  I've had some very nice shanks from Detoa, but they don't do Steinway so far as I know.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Some pretty radical suggestions have been given you about this action!  You say it's an old 'A'.  Whether you mean 'A' and not the Model '0' (_nought_, 6ft, 85 notes) I don't know, because people refer to the 6ft. model by various names.  Either way the piano is likely to have been set up originally very exactly in that era, so any talk of moving the standards or the rails seems to me rather dangerous and will, like any slight adjustment of anything in the action, affect a dozen other things.</div> <div><br></div> <div>...I wrote that this morning before you had given the number, and that figures perfectly, that is 1895-99.  There was no model A at the time, though the bass scale has the same layout and lengths.  You have 2 pairs of bichords and 7 covered trichords on the long bridge.</div> <div><br></div> <div>The hammers visible in your picture are the originals, wired together high on the flanks as per patent number (left it at the factory!).  Below is a picture of a similar shank with crucial dimensions.  This is hammer number 6.  The shank is round and of hornbeam.  Possibly this is from a Hamburg-made piano but in those days there was no difference I think, and things were done very exactly.  The distance from centre to hammer-core is shown here as 130mm.  It is just possible that on the style 0 and pianos from that era this dimension was 125mm.  I don't have one around to check, but it is one or the other and it will be obvious which with such a large difference as 5mm.</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><img src="cid:p06240808c36708691ad3@[10.0.0.1].1.0"></div> <div>So the distance from middle of hammer-rail to middle of hammer-core should be 153mm. for the strike line to be right.  But your man has taken off the old heads and stuck them on new shanks by the look of it, so goodness knows how well that was done.</div> <div><br></div> <div>You can be sure that the action standards and rails were placed in exactly the right position by Steinway, since Steinway was then Steinway.  If your man has not chewed up too many of the screw-holes and you can get away with it, I'd keep the original rails provided they have not split.  Otherwise fit new rails.  They don't cost much and don't take long to drill if you prepare the work properly.  The worst past of the job is soldering in the new rails in the right position.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Once you have checked that the hammer-heads are glued on at the right place (not at all certain, I'd think) then you can almost certainly get the thing working satisfactorily with the existing new parts in spite of the discrepancies.  People have mentioned packing with buckskin.  I've never seen this and wouldnt recommend it.  Use strips of card about 5mm wide to tip pack the lever flanges, so that the card is squeezed at least between the rail and all of the top hollow of the profile.  More is OK.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Incidentally the Steinway jack in those days was not adjustable as to its rest position but rested against a cloth-backed felt in the window of the cradle.</div> <div><br></div> <div>What I'd advise is to do the minimum but do it very right.  Unless you have a precise drawing, or preferably a movie, of a section of the piano complete with action, you can go round in circles for a week or two and get nowhere once you start guessing that such and such might fix such and such.  Get 5 notes right first and the rest is plain sailing.</div> <div><br></div> <div>JD</div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> </body> </html>