<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">   Dave Nereson wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE><style></style>     Does anyone call Steinway about these heavy actions?  What do they say?  Or do they deny any accusations of having built anything "wrong"?  Or is it not "wrong", but just heavy to certain players?    Has Steinway changed capstan alignment or angle or knuckle size recently?    If this were a new company just starting up, I could see how there might be action problems to iron out, but if a certain size action is basically the same as the one in front of or behind it on the assembly line, how can there be that much variance?    --David Nereson, RPT</blockquote> Oh... there can be quite a bit of variance. And believe it or not, Steinway is amoung the better students in the class. Buy yourself a Stanwood touchweight measuring kit from Pianotek, and start checking out actions as you get them in. Its actually increduable what you find of variances from pianos of same make. The best I've seen so far are the Hamburg Steinways (I dont get a chance to see any of the New York ones here so I cant speak to those) and these are closely followed by Yamaha actions. The rest of the players I run into are miles behind when it comes right down to it. All this just goes to show how much improvement on the origional idea attentive piano techs can achieve... and how much extra moolah they can make doing it... by simply hopping on the New Metrology by Stanwood bandwagon. RicB   -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. UiB, Bergen, Norway <A HREF="mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no">mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no</A> <A HREF="http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html">http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/ricmain.html</A> <A HREF="http://www.hf.uib.no/grieg/personer/cv_RB.html">http://www.hf.uib.no/grieg/personer/cv_RB.html</A>   </body> </html>