High(!) touchweight LONG

Delwin D Fandrich pianobuilders@olynet.com
Mon Sep 21 23:31 MDT 1998



Horace Greeley wrote:

> . . . .  (major snipping taking place)
>
>
> ... the "optimum" piano size landed in the roughly
> 9 foot range.  A piano of this size requires a hammer of a certain mass in
> order to be able meet those requirements.  A hammer that is too massive
> (and/or, too hard) will overdrive the tone-production/transduction system
> (strings, bridges, soundboard, etc.) of the instrument and produce the
> splatty, attack-heavy, thin kind of non-carrying tone which everyone loves
> to hate.  A piano that has insufficient mass (and/or is too hard), will
> produce much the same result, on a smaller, and, therefore, sometimes less
> egregiously annoying level.

Well, not necessarily.  Hammer mass and hammer density are not really the same
thing.  Hammers can be large, yet not very dense and/or massive.  They can also be
relatively small, yet be very dense and/or massive.  As well, simply making a
hammer more massive does not mean that more energy will be imparted into the
string.  With all action and hammer combinations there will come a point of energy
transfer saturation.  Once this point is reached, adding more mass to the hammer
will not result in more energy being transferred to the string, it will simply
introduce increasing levels of distortion (for lack of a better term).


> Further, the hammer that is too massive will also overload the lever system
> of the action, and require too much countering weight to produce an
> acceptable "down" weight, often achieved at the expense of repetition (more
> on this in a bit).

This is certainly true.  It will also introduce action saturation at a lower key
velocity.  There are no performance or acoustical benefits to this exercise in
futility. . . . .  (more major snipping taking place)  . . . .

> While moving the capstans is certainly in order on many of these actions,
> my consistent experience, particularly with instruments in which the action
> parts have been replaced with Renner/Tokiwa/etc, is that there is simply
> too much mass in the parts themselves, and that this, coupled with hammers
> that are also too large, and any potential deficiences in action geometry,
> are more likely to cause problems than the capstans.  This is not to say
> that the capstans should not get moved, just that it's a whole lot of work,
> compared to other things that can often leave (essentially) the same result.

This is also quite true.  Once again, the little tool I described was used with
new actions, mostly during the years from the 70's through the mid 80's.
Replacing action parts such as hammers, hammershanks and wippens was not an
option.  Well, it was, but the only viable replacements at the time were either
identical to those already in the piano or, in the case of the incredibly dense
and massive imported hammers available at the time, far worse.  This was/is
presented simply as a method of fairly easily optimizing the geometry of an
existing action, installed in a specific position on a given keyframe and using an
existing set of parts.  Our procedure of choice nowadays is to replace the action
components with parts that fit and work.  I still use that little devise from time
to time, though not with the regularity that I once did.  It is more of a
diagnostic tool now.

Regards,

Del




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