plastic parts back

[fndango@azstarnet.com]

James - Mark had the right idea: 60/hr. means 60 per hour, not 60 hours.
I'm really glad it doesn't take me 60 hours to install a set of
backchecks! The whole job, including regulation, took about 24 hours.

Joe - Roger gave a good account of factory procedures. I could have left
the hammer assemblies off until I finished the damper wire bending, but
that would have increased the time in the customer's home. I had a full
day's work there as it was. I'm glad I decided to reinstall the hammers
in the shop. And with the rails out of the way, the hammer shanks were
not much of an obstacle to bending the damper wires.

Wim - Replacing the whole wippen was an option. The cost of a wippen is
about 3 times the cost of the jack + flange + backcheck. In my case, I
already had the flanges and backckecks, and I wanted to use them. 90
jacks and 70 damper levers cost me $120 from Pacific Piano Supply.
Anyway, you have to balance the cost of the wippens vs the smaller
parts, and the time to install the new parts on the wippens, which in my
case was about 15 hours. With a different scenario, maybe I would have
gone for the whole wippens. Two things swing me to the direction I took:
1) I hate to throw anything away, 2) I find myself doing a lot of
repinning of new flanges I buy because they don't fit into my torque
specifications. So I had control over #2, and I felt good about #1.

Roger mentioned replacing the damper felt. It would be a good idea to
check that before jumping into a job like this. In my case the damper
felts were still OK. I just brushed them with a stiff-bristled tooth
brush. One thing I always do when I have a vertical action out of the
piano is to check the bichord and monochord wedges. I find a lot of
bichord wedges sticking through the strings so far that they don't clear
or barely clear when the key is depressed. I usually discover this when
I'm tuning in the low treble. The sound dies out quickly, and I mumble
to myself imprecations against the mfg. The monochord wedges get spread
apart sometimes enough to get held up on their neighbors. So I usually
do some damper trimming when I have an action out of the piano.

Incidentally, I charged $700 for my plastic parts job. I would like to
have gotten more, but I needed a sitting-down job as I fractured and
sprained my left ankle two months ago. So I was willing to underbid it.
There certainly are pianos not worth even that much action work, but
this one was.

Bob Anderson
Tucson, AZ