Fred~ Thank you so much for taking the time to communicate that excellent information. You addressed a lot of my bewilderment about tuning pins. The aesthetics vs salesmanship issue is a very pertinent one here, I agree. Thanks for reminding me of those two necessary qualities of any marketed product! Tuning pins must be sold, and "sell" and "show" are those two factors that salesmen must rely on. (Then the technician must deal with the implications or consequences of those "marketing" and "appearance" qualities, built into the tuning pins). The analogy with bushing cloth was a very good one. Who knows if Steinway embraced the white bushing cloth because of green standards, or because it helps differentiate their product, (or both)? Often products, it seems, have to an additional quality besides the "appearance" and "marketability" ones: "uniqueness," or "newness", to help differentiate one product from all the others on the market. I notice Brooks/Abel now has a new "natural felt" hammer, that is apparently being quite well received, but which arose partially out of an effort to stop using acids in the cleaning of felt, which caused environmental pollution; now they're substituting enzymes instead. "Natural" felt implies felt as it "should be", or felt as it was decades ago (the "newness" of old forms which had been abandoned for "improved forms.") The hammers are not "white" but more a "natural" color. I wonder if the new Steinway keybushing felt is similar. Is it "white" now, or "natural"? Think about all the products from the piano supply houses, like self-adhesive nameboard felt, "jiffy" leads, plastic key bushing inserts, universal bass strings, (and don't forget teflon bushings!) that were supposed to be the latest and greatest solution to our problems. (And don't get me going about "universal replacement parts", that are supposed to fit everything but end up fitting nothing well.) Yeah, they seemed like a great idea at the time, and they were "new" and supposedly "improved," and (supposedly) finally addressed a problem that we were all having; but because of their relative newness, they hadn't passed the test of time. Were the new parts any better? (Well, they could charge more for them.) You raised an excellent question: are tuning pins so basic that there is not much to be tampered with, and the basic variations (blued, or plated, or a combination of both, threads cut before or after plating, or bluing) are simply time tested differences necessary for different climates or applications; or do the tuning pins we use today have those sneaky "built-in improvements", used at one time to sell either more pins or more pianos, that maybe we should be looking at in the same way we now view self-adhesive nameboard felt.? (How many here still use self-adhesive nameboard felt? Hmmm?) So. Why DO front rail punchings have to be green? ;-) ~Kendall Ross Bean PianoFinders www.pianofinders.com <http://www.pianofinders.com/> e-mail: kenbean at pianofinders.com Connecting Pianos and People -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20080708/ea7026bc/attachment.html
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