<html> Every year, the WV Symphony treks up to Snowshoe for an outdoor concert.  There's a circus tent - huge - that seats about 1,000 plus the symphony, up on a stage.  The first time they took the piano, we discovered that there are wild swings in humidity:  fog rolling in at night, even penetrating into the enclosed tent, and burning off anywhere from 8 am to noon or so.  Totally unpredictable.  The first year, since we were 5 hours from home, the grounds & stage people scrounged up an array of lights, which we placed under the piano, which was then covered w moving blankets which draped to the floor.  In subsequent years, the symphony has used dampp chaser dehumidifying rods which they purchased through me.  We use about 5 rods and 2 humidistats.  What a difference!  Wally Wilson, RPT At 08:31 PM 8/19/01 -0500, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite cite>Hi Z!, Both of our concert grands have to the floor fitted= tarps, that are heavily quilted, it helps quite a bit. But there is no real way to over come those concerts in the park, stability type things. Minimizin= g is the best you can hope for. Besides the heavy tarp, laying two moving blankets on the strings inside the piano seems to help. But I may be fooling myself on that one. Insulate and protect, in the best way possible. Regards Roger. At 07:07 PM 8/19/01 -0400, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite cite>Hi Everyone! How hot can a piano get before you run into more serious problems than changes in the tuning? What are some of the problems people have observed after a piano got hot? Over the summer I tuned at a couple of festivals on what were otherwise beautiful summer days here in Detroit but must have been nightmares for the pianos. As usual, I was asked to tune first thing in the morning despite the stage manager's full knowledge that the tuning will be seriously "altered" by the time the featured artist was going to play. Over the course of all the set changes, the pianos were often relegated to some out-of-the-way corner of the stage where they sat out in full sunlight, often wearing black naugahyde covers. Those pianos were probably hot enough to roast a fat steak by the time I came back to them to "touch them up" just before the performances. (The stage managers have been told repeatedly not to leave the pianos out in full sunlight for any length of time ....) Since then, those pianos have been doing one-night stands all over metro Detroit and I haven't crossed paths with any of them yet since their sunbathing sessions. Nor have I heard any comments from the other technicians who have serviced them since then. Meanwhile I came to yet another concert rental recently which had numerous loose lead weights in the damper system, and I'm wondering if that one also got a good "sunburn" at some point over the summer. Thanks in advance -- Z! Reinhardt RPT Ann Arbor MI <a= href="mailto:diskladame@provide.net">diskladame@provide.net</a></blockquo= te> </blockquote> </html>