<html> <body> At 10:11 AM 2/9/2008, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Hi Israel,                   The reason for mentioning the spring and slot, is that it is one of those items, Out of sight, out of mind.  A loose centre pin is always obvious.  I know from my own experience, that doing various circles of regulation can be very frustrating, when you are not getting the desired result.  (Good stable hammer line to name one.)  The tip of the spring and slot, is the most common cause. To my way of thinking, checking/polishing/lubricating, the spring is just one of the steps to performance regulation.  Every bit as important as opening or closing the coil. The lubricant I use is MPL-1 use just enough to coat the spring, IN sever cases then the wippens have to be removed and the slots polished out with a sharpened hammer shank.. I then burnish the slot with  a hammer shank and MPL-1 grease. There will be no excess grease in the slot, just a film.  I don't like Graphite in any form, due to it's Hygroscopic nature. Regards Roger Yes, cleaning those spring slots is another issue. On some older Steinways I found that cleaning that slot and getting the gunk off the spring is all it took to get the spring tension close to where it needed to be. Regulating with all that goop in there just makes no sense at all. <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">But this brings me to another one of those problems that I have with how regulation is presented conceptually - and this is not meant to criticize  anything you wrote or said, Roger, but your post is just a convenient starting point for some thinking out loud... The way I see it, cleaning spring slots, and tightening screws, and lubricating the jacks and the knuckles, and correcting action center friction, and easing keys and similar stuff is something that one would do before one actually begins regulating an action. I see all this more as "cleaning-repair" than" than "regulating". Which may be a matter of semantics more than anything else - but sometimes semantics can make all the difference in the world when trying to teach a craft. Maybe lumping several procedures that are fundamentally different in nature and require different approaches and different mindsets under the rubric "Regulation" is a cause of confusion for students. It seems to me that conceptualizing "Regulation" as a unitary process is a major obstacle to students' understanding clearly what is going on and what it is that they are trying to accomplish at a given stage of regulation. After all, when we teach tuning we divide the process into several components - temperament, octaves, unisons - and develop skills within each and then put it all together. But with regulation we do the exact opposite - we teach the whole damned process as a unit and then leave it up to the student to extract the underlying concepts. Some teachers try to get into those concepts along the way - but then the students often end up with information overload and come out with some preposterous misunderstandings. Perhaps it's time to rethink how we conceptualize "Regulation" - present it as several distinct stages and develop a thorough understanding of what goes on within each before putting it all together - rather than throwing it all at the students at once as "X steps" and expecting them to make sense of it. And I - and some others I know - have actually been working on schemes of how to do just that - and trying them out in lass settings... Best regards... Israel Stein </blockquote></blockquote></body> </html>