Ron, Ron, and Bill. Well after reading Ron N's reply to this buisness about the jack moveing a bit backwards at the beginning of the key stroke, and reading Ron O's aggreement I simply had to take a closer look at this, and I found what perhaps is the reason for my observation seemingly pointing in the oposite direction. Thinking twice and thrice about Ron N's reasoning.... this made sense.. What I did was to remove the whippen spring from the jack, and place it beside the jack so the tension was still on the repetition lever. Then I removed the adjustment button so the jack was free to move in as much as it wanted to with no influence from the whippen spring either. Then I started setting the spread in both obviously wide and narrow positions to see what happened. For each spread setting I reset hammer distance to string, re-alligned the jack to the knuckle core, and I marked a line on the repetition lever extending the "start position" of the jacks back side so I could see clearly whatever movement would take place. What I found was there was no noticable difference. In all cases the jack moved backwards about 2 and a half mm before stopping backwards movement. There it stayed until the jack tender came into play. I tried adding a spring between the back of the jack and the spoon, and the same results. The spring was equally compressed as best I could tell. (Tried to set the initial spring tension equally...but it was a bit crude) OK... I was wrong thought I...grin.. But then after reinstalling everything as it should be and rechecking the two spreads again.... there it was.. No backwards movement with a wide spread.. and a very small but easily noticable amount with a narrow spread. However !!.. :) if you pressed the jack backwards to begin with (narrow spread) then there was no backwards movement. That meant the something was preventing the jack (with narrow spread) from getting fully back into its rest position. This is where Ron N's thinking comes in... but in reverse. With the narrow spread, and because of the same kind of reasoning Ron had for thinking the backwards movement of the jack would get worse, the jack was being prevented from comming full in to rest position. With a wide spread the jack could very easily slip fully into rest position and then the felt was alread compressed enough to prevent it from moveing any farther backwards in this first part of keystroke. So... thats what I think is happening.. thats what it looked like.. and it makes sense...grin.. I think anyways. -- Richard Brekne RPT, N.P.T.F. Bergen, Norway
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