In a message dated 6/10/1999 4:14:28 PM, Richard wrote: <<"I am curious Jim, did you do any maintainance to the de-Capo bar and / or agraffes as part of the restringing ?">> Richard; As I was/am thouroughly familiar with this particular piano I knew that there were no significant problems with the agrafffes, so no, I did not do anything special except give them a more than 'cursory' examination and clean them (holes) with a brass brush. (very little wear at all and no elongation of the holes was evident and as such was/is reflected by the ease of tuning and the clean clear tone from each individual string, bass and tenor) Also, time was a factor in starting and completing the job as we had essentially 24 working hours to do it in. If it had been in my shop instead of on the stage?? I don't know that I would have done it differently given the piano and familiarity....but one never know do one? :-) <<"Also I had a guy once tell me that it was a good idea to re-pin the bridge from time to time. His point was that bridge pins also develop flat spots and knicks that influence tone and clarity. Anyone out there heard about this ?">> I am kinda of the school of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" train of thought. And although there were several "problem" notes, notably a 'D' in the tenor and a 'C', in the top tenor, which both proved to be loose pins in the 'back' of the bridge, there were no discernable problems, flat spots on pins, cracks, etc. on either bridge. (side bar note: while inspecting pins I noticed there is a "step" down on the tenor bridge back where the wire changes from #20 to #21, the "step down" is aprox. the same depth as normal bridge cap. I have strung many 'D's and I swear I don't recall ever seeing this "step down" before...is this a feature/characteristic of Hamburg 'D's or am I just missing something........like memory? :) As for the capos, again I did nothing except clean up some burrs, these probably happened during broken string replacement., other than that nothing but running some carbide paper over them to clean them up. Both capo sections were in excellent shape, very little in the way of grooves........if I didn't know better I would say that Hamburg uses a harder pig iron for their plates than New York :-) Jim Bryant (FL)
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