A. Hipkins is a self made historian. Everything he says must me taken with a grain of salt. He personally claims to have forced the entire Broadwood Factory to tune using Equal Temperament (he was foreman of the factory for a while). He is the person most responsible for starting the believe that J.S. Bach was a advocate of Equal-Temperament. Ron Torella wrote about his Bluethner grand thinking that insuffucient downbearing will cause anemic tone.-----Not true!! To the contrary, the amount of bearing is proportional to the rate at which the energy is transferred to the bridge-soundboard system. The only reason that I am aware of that necessitates any downbearing at all is that a certain amount will resist the changes made by the board to the tension of the string. I not even sure about that but it was suggested to me by Harold Conklin former head of R & D for Baldwin. As far as Ron's belief that low tension is responsible here is what I suggest. Bluethner has had a fine reputation and the piano probably deserves every attention to detail. I would call the Sandersons at 1-800-FAST440 and ask that they send you a rescaling kit. One of the Sandersons now rescales and duplicates Bass Strings for about $300.00 per set. Rescaling is up at the top of the list for things that can improve the sound of the piano the most and I personally do not hesitate to rescale any grand. Sanderson makes the strings himself on his own lathe and gives an attention to detail that you can find nowhere else. There are many reason for rescaling and the common reason that is usually given is that it will correct problems with inharmonicity that occurred in the orginal scale. Another, and perhaps more important, is that of forcing tension to be constant throughout the scale. The effect of this is to provide an even downbearing force that remains constant across the bridge and soundboard and thus eveness of tone by controlling that rate of energy transfer that I mentioned above. Just by general principle of design one would wish to eliminate things that are variable where they don't need to be. There are several other things that this eveness of tension will do for the piano that are more subtle. If I think outloud I might want to examine the group speed of transverse waves in an area of the piano...Just a thought...maybe garbage...to see what physical model would occur as a result of non constant tension. Afterall, one does buy variable gauge wire to restring a piano. That's a funny idea and I can't imagine the results. As far as the action is concerned there are several things worth looking at. I would suggest measuring Upwieght and Downweights for all the C's and F's before you desmantle it. Calculate the the weigth of the each of the samples. You can also take that downweight on each of your samples and time with a stopwatch the amount of time it takes between the begining of movement through letoff. This will give you a good idea of the amount of Inertia in the key hammer system. You can later try sample parts and compare the changes. Also, Weigh the orignal parts for comparison with the new parts. My belief is that it is not necessarily the best thing to replace all the parts automatically. Purchase the Renner action kit that they are selling. It has sample of all of the parts that they sell. You can take these parts and try various things. Good Luck!! Michael Wathen College-Conservatory of Music University of Cincinnati
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