Dear Ron, As you can see from the responses to date, if you have already covered the obvious points of minimizing friction and regulating, there are no easy ways to significantly reduce the touch weight of this action. The ideal solution would be to basically redesign the leverage in one way or another. Del's suggestion of moving the capstans is one possibility. Another that we have used with excellent results here is to cut off the knuckles and install new ones at 17mm from the hammershank center (assuming that the original shanks had a 15.5mm knuckle set, which is likely). You would then need to shim the rep flanges by approximately the same amount of change. This is the "quick & dirty" method; the ideal method is to install new parts (with the 17mm dimension), especially given the age of the instrument. After such redesigns we have been able to remove two or three large leads from many of the keys and still keep an ideal touch weight. Because of my beliefs about mind/body connections in health and wellness, I personally would not tell a pianists that they were in danger of inflicting physical damage to themselves playing on such a keyboard, especially if you are not in a position to offer any immediate and significant relief--the power of suggestion, you know... If the user had expressed concern about the weigh, I would share objective data and offer any suggestions for change I could. Charles Ball, RPT School of Music University of Texas at Austin ckball@mail.utexas.edu
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