Hi David Skolnik No.. I meant what I meant. But I see now what the confusion is all about. Funny that none of the folks that regularly deal with Yamaha picked up on this. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say... so I will include a picture of the Yamaha Damper Capstan system. As you can see the capstans are lifted by the tray, but attached to the underside of the whippens. And that I think should answer your questions and befunderments :) I just noticed the picture Ron included in his response to Mark and see the function of that is entirely different. I will think on the matter, but my first reaction is that one has no way of assuring precise damper timing for each key with that system outside of shimming the keyback felts... which is the whole point of the Yamaha capstans. If the capstans on the tray in Rons picture are simply to make adjusting pedal lift of the dampers easier.... well I see the point but have no problem doing this the standard way myself. Cheers RicB Its probably good that this confusion came up... so as to avoid techs thinking they can treat each system alike. RicB - We know you meant "damper lift", not "hammer lift". Otherwise, I'll take two opportunities to prove my ignorance. Or not. I gotta tell you, I'm reading this over and over and I isn't getting it. It seems to be mixing up the key based damper lift with the sustain pedal lift. Traditionally, you would set your sample damper heights to the key lift (1/3 to 1/2, no?), then set the other damper levers to the same height. You would then shim or scrape to refine key lift, and the same for tray (sustain pedal) lift. I would have thought that the capstans would address the latter step. How do the capstans have anything to do with key lift? And refining the damper lift by loosening the screw and readjusting the wire doesn't make sense. Help me understand. David Skolnik At 03:27 PM 3/23/2007, you wrote: >Hi Mark... > >I cant speak for any article on the subject... but the Yamaha >Academy at Hamamatsu teaches that the reasons for capstans is to >assure that each hammer lifts at exactly half blow. Since at the >time they only had this feature on CF III's and I was at masters >level I only had this shown to me quickly and only then because I >was ahead of pace enough that they bothered to run me through it. > >One set samples for each section so that the damper lever started in >motion with the hammer at half blow for all samples. Then one >leveled the capstans with a straight edge from below. At that point >we were taught that these were not to be adjusted again unless it >was to re-level the entire set of capstans. > >They were NOT to be used to fine adjust damper lift from the >strings. This was to be done as normal by loosening the damper wire >screw and raising or lowering the damper as required. They were >very adamant about that. > >Cheers >RicB -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Yamaha Damper Capstans.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 80940 bytes Desc: not available Url : https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20070324/1d4346b2/attachment-0001.jpg
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