Damper pedal, hmm... It is a 6' 5" Chickering with all original parts in the action except the hammers. The hammers appear to be Standard or Rosen from about thirty years ago. They are extremely dry. Hammers like soundboards can loose their resiliency over time. The dampers are even the originals. I took one look at the dampers and decided I could not duplicate the quality so I left them on...so their is some bleed through which overtime will be come less and less. The string scale is not original it was designed by Sanderson. He also made the bass strings. Once again you can visit the site below to see a picture of a modified string rest system. The picture is the Chickering in question. Originally it had pieces of felt glued to the plate adjacent to the hitch pins. I wanted first of all to control the down bearing across the bridge to make it as minimal as possible because the board was over a hundred years old. The rest are made from sections of cut up bass strings. I had a set of unused bass strings sitting around. I could pick from a full range of diameters to raise the string till I achieved the right bearing. I should not here that all this was required because I replaced a hopeless bridge cap. The second reason for changing the system was that I wanted to get a little resonant sympathetic vibration from the soundboard. This piano has agraffes all the way to the top. So I also went to a machinist and had him make some 3/8" half rounds out of high carbon steel to act as string rests (counter bearing bars) between the tuning pin and the agraffe. These sections also have some sympathetic resonance but more importantly I think that they return some energy to the speaking portion of the string. Now I not sure what DDF will think about this because I'm still confused about his portion with regards to Un tuned duplexes. But I would like to hear more of what he has to say about it. So check out the picture: http://ucccm56.ccm.uc.edu/duplex.jpg ,.,.,,,.,,,,,,.,.,,,.,,,,,,,.,,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,, ,,,.,.,.,., Michael J. Wathen, RPT Phone: 513-556-9565 Piano Technician Fax: 513-556-3399 College-Consevatory of Music Email: Michael.Wathen@UC.Edu University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH 45221-0096 http://www.uc.edu/~wathenmj/
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