Jasper American Piano

[J Patrick Draine]

>In a message dated 11/21/00 10:38:24 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>mfarrel2@tampabay.rr.com writes:
>
>>Anyone ever hear of a Jasper American Piano? I tuned a 42" console today
>>that was reported to be about 5 years old. It had the name of a local small
>>time piano dealer bolted/nailed/screwed/glued to the plate and to the
>>fallboard.
>
>The Parent corporation of Kimball is Jasper American Inc. This name was used
>to provide "exclusive" dealerships to more than one dealer in a given area.
>
>Its a Kimball.
>

In other words, Jaspers were the extraordinarily low ball "loss 
leader" units that dealers could have their own name plates on -- and 
of course these units invariably had "zero prep" (at least in my 
slight experience with them).
Instead of the high flight tune-offs between Coleman & Smith, the 
ultimate PTG challenge might have been having a couple of our 
superstars each uncrate one of those puppies, and after a frenzy of 
string seating and hammer needling, see what they could turn them 
into. With a new set of bass strings ( I don't know whether a 
rescaling would improve the situation, but the quality of the sets 
were often very poor) -- perhaps replace the "fake buckskin" with 
real buckskin, etc. one might have a spinet or console you wouldn't 
mind retuning annually (well, *maybe*).
Just a thought,
Patrick