<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">   "Kevin E. Ramsey" wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE><style></style>     Stephen Powell, RPT wrote;      As I understand it, Yamaha dries the wood in their pianos to an EMC appropriate for the region that it is to be shipped to. For instance, a piano that is going to be shipped to the Southwest U.S., would probably have about a 4% moisture content. The problem is when a piano is meant to be used in one climate, but ends up in another. I used to live near a military installation, ( Twenty Nine Palms Marine Corp Air Combat Center, CA.), and I would see a few pianos that had been purchased in Okinawa, Japan, or Guam. They were nearly new when I saw them, but believe me, they didn't like the desert!  Kevin E. Ramsey <a href="mailto:ramsey@extremezone.com">ramsey@extremezone.com</a></blockquote> Personally, it is my personal type view that the problem is nothing more then complicated then the public at large, and for that matter a significant amount of tooner / techs havent got the foggiest idea what a piano really is.  For so very very many a piano is simply something that has all these black and white keys (preferably all of them) and makes this kind of noise when you push down on one of them. Oh yeah... sometimes you need to call some guy.... (are there girls that do this stuff too ???, can you really make a living at this ???) to come and toone it. If people knew, or cared enough to know, how to take care of an instrument made largely of wood, then none of this kind of stuff would be a significant problem. In most cases its easy enough to provide a decent and appropriate climate for a piano.     -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. Bergen, Norway <A HREF="mailto:Richard.Brekne@grieg.uib.no">mailto:Richard.Brekne@grieg.uib.no</A>   </body> </html>