About 10 months ago I tuned a Julius Bach spinet approximately 25 years old; the tuning was uneventful except that I had to shim one tuning pin before the one pin would hold. I was called to tune the piano again this morning. The piano had been moved from its position of last year to a new position in the same room, the owner saying he was hoping that the piano would stay in tune better in its new position. I found the bass and treble sections to be at pitch; the mid-range was noticeably flat making the piano sound poor. I did one rough-tuning pass, during which the piano seemed to hold. I had noticed during the first pass that the second unison on the tenor bridge (C#3?) was unusually flat. During the second pass the C#3 seemed to hold, but as I tuned up into octave 4, I heard _the sound_. The customer was in the back yard outside the house and claimed to have heard _the sound_ from there. One of the strings of C#3 had "broken" and when I investigated, I found a break in the plate below the tenor end of the long bridge. The break went through a hitch pin hole, releasing the hitch pin and one string of C#3. I suspect that had I investigated when I originally found C#3 quite flat, I would have found a crack in the plate. But because the tuning pin that I had shimmed was in the unison a half-step above, I thought nothing of finding flat notes in the area. I'm not sure what I would have done, had I found a crack. Since the piano is not valuable and would not be worth any substantial repair work, perhaps I would have been asked to continue the tuning and hope for the best. May you never hear _the sound_. Kent Swafford
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