<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> Like I said... buy the company for the 49,95 it takes and put Del in Charge... ok.. the 49,95 think was a joke... but I have little doubt that Del,  grin .. given dictatorial powers and a fat enough operating budjet for a few years ... could make this thing work. <blockquote TYPE=CITE> <blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 solid 2px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> Under the circumstances, I'll take it in cash up front, thank you... I feel duty bound to point out, of course, that I'm not at all equipped to function as a company CEO. A piano designer, yes, but I do know my place. And Willem is right, of course. It will take considerably more than $49.95 to purchase Baldwin. Even the past 25 plus years of somewhat less than enlightened management has not managed to wreck that much havoc. Still, much opportunity has been lost and as to whether there is enough time and enough resources to turn the company around at this point, only time itself will tell. It the company is able to bring someone in soon enough to start putting the pieces back together again -- who knows. Several have mentioned that Baldwin has the capability to build great pianos. Well, let's just say that they have the potential to build rather nice pianos when everything goes well. That means they have the potential to build pianos that are -- with one or two notable exceptions -- the equal of most anything being built in this country today. But it won't happen. No matter how hard they work on 'quality.' Because it's no longer a quality issue. It's a design and manufacturing issue. Baldwin made the decision to transition itself out of the high-end piano market when it left Cincinnati. Not that there is anything at all wrong with the workers in Arkansas -- properly trained and supervised they are quite capable workers. But the company left behind a long-term and very experienced work force that was used to turning out first rate instruments at a moderate, but steady and dependable pace, and attempted -- with a new and inexperienced workforce -- to speed up the production of a fundamental design that simply does not lend itself well to fast production. It was like Steinway's experience during the 1970s when it was owned by CBS: there was a directive to increase production from something like 2,500 pianos a year to 5,000 per year without adding appreciably to their facility or their workforce. Couldn't be done without great damage to the product. Those designs also were not amenable to rushing, something Steinway's current management seems to understand quite well and is capitalizing on. Baldwin has five grand piano designs that were intended to be built relatively slowly by workers who were highly skilled and experienced at what they were doing. When everything works properly most of these designs yield pianos that sound and perform as well as any other similar, traditional design. The problem, of course, is that if anything goes wrong along the way none of them are going to sound all that great. Unfortunately, the way they are being built today, things go wrong more often than they go right. Which is, of course, a complex way of saying that all of Baldwin's first line of pianos are obsolete. As are most of their vertical designs. Their 43" (109 cm), or whatever, console piano is a joke. It was originally designed as a 40" (101.6 cm) scale and stretched to whatever it is today by adding a 2" (5.1 cm) flange to the bottom of the plate and whatever to the casework and casters. The 243 Hamilton (what is it now, 46"?) was originally designed in the 1930s, if memory serves, and given a superficial redesign in the late 1980s. It should have been replaced. The 248 is the only relatively new design in their vertical lineup. Except, of course, for the rather eclectic Model 6000 which is very much a love it/hate it sort of piano. No one wants to listen to my solution. Which is to start over one by one with state of the art designs that are planned from the start to be built using simple, but sturdy tooling operated by semi-skilled to skilled workers. Designs in which most any task or process can be learned by any reasonably intelligent worker in just a couple of weeks. Designs which can be built with precision because they are designed to be simple. Designs in which there is a sufficient margin of error built into the materials selection and assembly process so that even if perfection is not always attained -- and it won't be -- the resulting instruments are still going to perform up there with the best instruments of the world. Is this just daydreaming? No. Not really. A lot has been learned about both piano design and piano building during the last seventy-five to one hundred years. And it's been about that long since most of these pianos were designed. We can do much better now. Such designs are now possible. 'But new piano design is problematic and uncertain, isn't it? I mean...how do you know if it will 'come out all right.' Easy. By understanding the basics of piano design. How does an architect know that the building she is designing is going to stand up through the next earthquake? Through study and experience. It's not rocket science. (Well, designing buildings for earthquakes might be -- piano design is not.) 'But this would really take a long time, wouldn't it?' The company doesn't have much time. No, Not really. With a suitable, though not large, staff, a company committed to the project the whole line could be done in a couple of years. 'But such a program would be extremely expensive, wouldn't it?' Again, no not really. At least not for a company already in business. At least it wouldn't have been in Baldwin's case since one of the more expensive components of a new design is the plate pattern and they were already investing in quite a bit of pattern work when they switched foundries. New vertical designs can be incorporated into ongoing production processes. And air operated rim presses are not all that complicated or expensive to make. Good grief, if we can make one in our small workshop surely a company the size of Baldwin can do it as well. Work tables and assembly fixtures can be modified from stuff already on hand. Pinblock fitting is still pinblock fitting. Stringing is still stringing. Except for spacing actions aren't going to change much. Keys are keys. Well, you get the idea. But none of this is going to happen. This scenario would require a considerable amount of courage and long-range thinking on the part of the companies top management. An understanding of things like long-range product planning and an understanding market trends early enough to deal with them pro-actively rather than trying to react to them after the fact. Bob Hoff wrote in the latest Journal that the U.S. manufacturers could not compete against the imports. I pretty much reject statements like this out of hand: American piano manufacturers simply chose not to compete out of -- depending on the company -- a combination of greed, arrogance, lethargy, fear and ignorance. They had a solid head start, but instead of reinvesting in their company's future the various managers allowed their plants to run down and their products to become obsolete while in other countries other managers were investing heavily in production equipment and new designs (albeit designs often patterned closely after old U.S. or European designs). No, we didn't lose an industry -- we deliberately threw one away. So, there. This seems to have been another of my nights for ranting and raving. I think I've gotten it out of my system now. At least for a while. Regards, Del</blockquote> </blockquote> -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. Bergen, Norway <A HREF="mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no">mailto:rbrekne@broadpark.no</A>   </body> </html>