[CAUT] Shellac Voicing

[Ed Sutton]

FWIW, only once have I added shellac to a set of Abel Natural hammers, and 
it was on the insistence of the customer.

The piano was a 1920's S & S M, original soundboard, showing some weakness 
in the first capo section. My preference was to leave the hammers alone, but 
the owner wanted more bang in octaves 5 and 6, so finally I agreed to harden 
that area. I put in thin shellac, and then used pure alcohol to flush it 
away from the surface.

Again, I would have prefered leaving it alone, but after 6 months and many 
voicing adjustments the customer was still very unhappy, so I agreed to 
harden the treble hammers.

Ed S.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Rembold" <d_rembold at yahoo.com>
To: <caut at ptg.org>
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 9:51 PM
Subject: Re: [CAUT] Shellac Voicing


Hi Andrew,

Abel Naturals are an excellent choice for a replacement hammer, but no my 
part I have not yet had to add power to a new set; quite the contrary.

I'm just wondering, are there just a few notes that sound like they need to 
be brought up, or the entire piano?  What brand of piano is it, and how old? 
On the last Hamburg Steinway O that I used the Abels on, I found that once I 
needled down the sections that had extra noise, the entire piano had more 
power.  My guess is that more power was going into tone production, less 
into unwanted noise.  No hardening was needed in that case.

Also, on your premise that lacquer continues to harden over the life of the 
hammer, I would tend to disagree.  The apparent continuing hardness must be 
coming from something else, since lacquer doesn't harden over time.  I've 
been spraying nitrocellulose off and on for 30 years, and I can still make 
an impress into lacquer finishes I did years ago, with just a thumbnail.  I 
may be off by transferring that idea to hammers, but that's my observation.

No matter what you choose to use--shellac, lacquer or acetone-based--where 
you place the solution into the hammer will have the most effect on tone. 
If you do use shellac, the off-the-shelf prepackaged kind is never 
consistent--you can get flakes from woodworker.com pretty reasonable.  The 
dedicated shellac thinner is probably best too, since paint-store varieties 
of denatured alcohol are all various blends of kerosene, naptha, gasoline, 
and who knows what else.

Let us know how it works out.
Dan Rembold
Auburn University