Back in 1973 I did weight the damper heads on Anton Keurti's Hamburg Steinway D. It was my first acquaintance with him, and the circumstances make for a fairly long story, if you can bear with me. He had brought the piano from Toronto to here (London, Ontario) for a concert he was performing a week later. He asked me to replace all the wedge and singles damper felt, which he brought with him, sans the red backing. This came from Germany, and I was glad of that, as the agraffe holes were wider spaced than are New York Steinways, and most felts not specific to these would have been a real problem. A few bass felts had been replaced with some coarse hairy stuff, and a sizable hex nut was glued on top of one damper head. He ranted about the slow damping on F2, the bottom tenor note. This damper is short of course . He said that every D he played had the same problem and that it was lousy design. Although he did not complain about it, I found the singles to also damp slowly. After replacing all the felts including red backing from my own stock I re-installed the dampers. Result? No improvement whatever. I suppose I could have simply said I did what I could and that's the way the piano is, but it so happened I had a gunsmith's lead furnace I had acquired, not to make bullets , but to experiment with key leading. The Hamburg Steinway does not use damper lever springs, and the levers were already fully loaded with leads, so I decided to pour molten lead into two holes in each damper head, one on either side of the wire.. I duly bored the holes, 3/16" dia. and not right through and did the pouring, a tricky job.. When cooled I spread the lead with an improvised punch. There was no visible scorching of the wood, and the added weight was under 2 grams. The effect on the touch was undetectable.The evening of the concert, Anton arrived. He glared at me and marched up to the piano, I knew what he was going to do, and he did. He gave the F2 a big thump, stacatto. It damped! Perfectly. Anton said not a word, but gave me two of his LP's after the concert. I have lost count of the number of times I have prepared pianos for his performances over the years and we have becomes good friends. But this was the only time I ever weighted damper heads. Ted Sambell ________________________________ From: Ron Nossaman <rnossaman at cox.net> To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Thu, December 23, 2010 8:44:23 AM Subject: Re: [CAUT] damper touch weight - head-weight preference? On 12/20/2010 9:28 AM, Ron Nossaman wrote: > On 12/20/2010 9:19 AM, David Skolnik wrote: >> Thanks Rn, I'll buy it, though I do wonder about the inertial effects of >> having that weight at the end of that wire. In theory, that 'compliance' >> you speak of could be exacerbated (yea, I know) by the increased >> resistance of the head weight. > > That's the point. > > Ron N > Sorry, I got sidetracked and didn't finish this. As to damping, putting the mass in the head minimizes compliance between the damper mass and the string. It's a more direct coupling than with the mass in the under lever. It may be a problem in the power stroke if the mass is high, guide bushing loose, or wire bends extreme, but for damping, it's ideal. Ron N -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101223/c5cbbffb/attachment.htm>
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