Steinway L anomaly

Horace Greeley hgreeley@stanford.edu
Fri, 02 Apr 2004 00:26:31 -0800



Jim, et al,

Hey, Harvey!  Glad to see that you are still making trouble!

Reading the posts on this, and letting things percolate around in the soggy 
mess that passes for my mind, I remember a B (yeah, wrong model, I know) 
with a similar set of issues.  After much scratching of the head (less bald 
than now) and trying of different things, I finally found the culprit to be 
the bridge pins binding against the under side of the plate in the low 
tenor...but only under some temp/humidity conditions (both relatively high).

Yes, the piano was in a bar...of sorts, Howard Lundsman's old 
Concerts-by-the-Sea, under the pier in Manhattan Beach...great jazz 
club...kind of picked up where the old Mannehole and Lighthouse (both 
originally Shelly Manne places) left off.  (Shelly Manne, 1920 - 1984, was 
one of the all-time great and stylistically versatile jazz drummers; 
perhaps best known later on leading the group: "Shelly Manne & His 
Men"...there seems to be a number of his recordings available from the Jazz 
at the Philharmonic series being re-released on CD.)  But I digress...

I don't think that this is what you are dealing with here...sounds to me 
like you've got a good picture of things and several good ways to go.  At 
the same time, I wanted to pass this bit of nostalgia along before is 
disappears forever beneath encroaching senility...

Cheers!

Horace


At 12:13 PM 4/1/2004, you wrote:
>Hello folks,
>
>I need some sage advice (or best guesses) from the Steinway guru's.
>
>Steinway L, #498954, previously serviced several times, the last time
>being 12/05/03. A pitch adjustment of 9 cents was done. The
>environment at that time was temperature of 67 and RH at 35%. These
>values are quite consistent over the four calls since getting the
>client, with the exception of the slight pitch raise.
>
>The day -after- the last tuning, I got a call that the piano was
>making strange noises. Since I was across the street with another
>client at the time, a return call was easily done.
>
>The client admitted that he had played the piano after the tuning, and
>everything was fine. The next day, the noises began. Figuring a paper
>clip, lamp rattle, forgotten tool (me?), etc., I assumed it would be a
>straight in/out deal.
>
>No such luck. In octaves 5~6 (crossing the scale break) there is an
>obnoxious sound on certain notes. It requires at least a medium to mf
>blow to generate the sound, and that sound could best be described as
>a "grunt". The last time I heard this characteristic sound was on a
>vertical, whose soundboard was lose from the liner.
>
>Cursory checks (including crawling under and scraping wood shards and
>glue sizing from the soundboard perimeter) did nothing. Ditto touching
>things... well, I won't go into an entire check list.
>
>Further inspection topside revealed that the nose bolt for the
>bass/tenor strut seemed to be touching the cutout in the soundboard.
>Unfortunately, this was only a visual thing since I didn't have any
>type of feeler to verify this from above or below. The bolt also
>seemed to be leaning, with a rake slightly toward the player and
>favoring the bass. I don't normally pay a lot of attention to this
>type of thing unless there is cause to do so. This was one of those
>times.
>
>I'm open to any, and preferably alternate ideas. However, if this nose
>bolt is the noise culprit, it generates a bunch of questions for me.
>
>Questions like:
>(1) has it always been that way?
>(2) why is it leaning (factory expedient via sledge hammer?)
>(3) could the results of a 9 cent pitch raise cause -just- enough
>board movement to hit the "magic" spot between board and bolt?
>(4) how does one "fix" something like this without excessive
>trauma/expense?
>(5) is the easy way out (get several bass strings out of the way;
>file/rasp) a fix or a Band-Aid? Instinct tells me the bolt should be
>straight and centered.
>(6) why is the noise generated by higher frequencies? (this one is
>more or less rhetorical)
>
>I reluctantly admitted to the client that I was out of ammunition
>at the time, but am scheduled for another call soon. Since I've heard
>nothing more from the client, I'd like to think that whatever caused
>the problem has gone away as mysteriously as it appeared! Either way,
>I need to be prepared to do... something.
>
>--
>Regards,
>  Jim                          mailto:harvey@greenwood.net
>
>_______________________________________________
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