Piano Plates by HS CNC milling.

[BSimon999@AOL.COM]

A440A@AOL.COM writes:

<< Hmmm,  OK,  I see.  Del is going to start out with a 3,000 lb. chunk of 
steel 
and a really good CNC milling machine, and cut that sucker out of a solid 
billet!   (?)  >>

Not so strange!

I keep an eye on advances in high speed machining.  It is depressing because 
the trend is from a design on the computer screen to the CNC machine which 
dumps out the final product. The romance of machining is going, fast.

In the latest issue of "Modern Machine Shop"  (see   www.mmsonline.com  ), in 
an article titled "Boeing's One Part Harmony," pictures are shown of the 
speed brakes for F-15 fighters. Formerly, the 11 foot long, three foot wide, 
1 foot deep part was made of 500 individual parts in three months. Now the 
part is now made by HS CNC machining  out of a single block of solid aluminum 
in 30 hours at 40,000 rpm tool speed.  It has numerous thin wall sections, 
.040," and the entire part is made to about a thousandth of an inch 
precision. The part is, of course, better and cheaper than the old. 

They also make a "porkchop" ( a landing gear bulkhead for a C-17 cargo plane) 
- that looks remarkably like a piano plate, which is about 6 feet by 8 feet, 
several inches thick,  out of a solid block in 12 hours, a part that used to 
take months to manufacture.

This type of technology does tend to filter down to other industries, albeit 
slowly because nothing else is a pricey as airplane parts. 

It is possible, though economically unlikely for the foreseeable future,  to 
build a piano, every part of which is made to a thousandth of an inch, 
including the rim, soundboard and plate. You could slip a perfectly regulated 
action out on one piano and into another and it would need no touch-up 
regulation.

The whole piano to a thousandth of an inch, never.  Just the plate, its 
supports and the bridges in relation to the plate, - why not?

(Of course you must realize that the tuning of this piano will be done 
perfectly in 4 minutes by a  multi-armed robot with a positronic SAT brain, 
and we will just buy one and chauffeur it around.)

Bill Simon
Phoenix