Carol, It's parafin, not soap - and there is no fix, except a new pinblock. Horace At 04:53 PM 2/23/97 -0800, you wrote: > I hope this question has not been posed before. If so please direct >me to where! I encountered a Steinway L, serial #474??? (circa 1981) that >has a few loose tuning pins in the bass. > > What makes these pins special, is that they are near the plate >screws that hold the pinblock to the plate. Since the pinblock is very >narrow in the bass, only 4 or 5 tuning pins are affected if I think I have >the problem diagnosed. My suspicion is that soap was used on these plate >screws as a lubricant when the piano was assembled in the factory, and that >the soap has traveled over the years into the adjacent tuning pin holes. >All the other tuning pins in the piano are fine, and all other "first row >pins" aren't as close to plate screws as these in the bass are. > > I replaced the worst pin with another one just slightly larger, and >it worked just fine. I am on borrowed time with about 3 others. My question >is: if soap really leached into these tuning pin holes, am I not on >borrowed time with my bigger pins? The piano is not that old, what is the >long term solution? Should I be thinking about swabbing these tuning pin >holes with something that will dissolve the soap? Will I eventually have to >"plug" these holes and if so, what is to keep the soap from loosening the >glue around the plugs? > >Thanks for your help! > >Carol Beigel, RPT >Greenbelt, Maryland > > > Horace Greeley "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein Stanford University email: hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu voice mail: 415.725.9062 LiNCS help line: 415.725.4627
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