plastic parts back back

[James Grebe]

Hi Bob,
I am glad for you that I interpreted your post wrong.  I still wouldn't do
another one, though.
James Grebe
R.P.T. of the P.T.G
pianoman@inlink.com
Creator of Handsome Hardwood Caster Cups and Practical Piano Peripherals in
St. Louis, MO
-----Original Message-----
From: fndango@azstarnet.com <fndango@azstarnet.com>
To: pianotech@ptg.org <pianotech@ptg.org>
Date: Thursday, November 05, 1998 3:57 PM
Subject: Re: plastic parts back


>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
>