>I've tried everything on these. Sometimes, >if you take your brass rod (used for seating strings) and put pressure on >the bridge pin, the beat stops. I've even tried tapping them in a little >further, didn't seem to work. I believe that some of the falseness on a >Kimball is because the bearing bar is often flat, instead of being a nice >rounded surface, but of course, you can't take off the strings and re-shape >it unless you're re-stringing the piano. > I once sat through a three hour class which promised to address the >issue, only to find that the instructor didn't really have anything >practical to offer about curing this problem. I don't have anything practical to offer either, unfortunately. I wish I did. At one time or another I've tried about everything anyone's ever mentioned and a few things no one should ever do (EVER). All spot experimentation done at my expense because I don't recall ever having a customer complain about "those wild strings up there" and offer to pay for the attempt. My current conclusion is that the best I can hope for with tuning these gems (K&J) is minimum garbage with what the piano will give me. Coincidentally, that's the best I can hope for with any other piano too, but the final result will be somewhat more pleasing to me on a better instrument. I think if those nice rotary cut horizontally laminated bridges had an equally nice rotary cut horizontally laminated cap with much thinner laminations, so there was some actual structural integrity to the cap at the top, and they were reasonably accurately notched, with minimum #7 sized pins and up instead of #6, the pins wouldn't be nearly as loose, and they wouldn't be anywhere near as wild and wooly to tune as they are. They'd still go out of tune quicker and farther than anything else out there with any climate shift, but they'd probably tune a whole lot cleaner in the treble. I suspect that doesn't qualify as a pre-tuning field repair though. Ron N
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