no more "snuggles"

[Bill Ballard]

At 8:07 PM -0700 10/27/00, piano lover88 wrote:
>A fellow tech tells me that he is NOT using snuggles any more, (for 
>voicing) because he strongly believes that it damages/ruins hammers 
>in the long run. He now uses denatured alcohol and water..

That's his opinion, What's yours. Mine is that each has its place. 
Water-based expansion of felt masses (using either alcohol or steam 
temperatures to overcome the surface tension obstacle) works great 
with felt densified by hot pressing or by work hardening (heavily 
played hammers). When the fibers in a felt mass have been encased 
and/or glued together by reinforcers, Snuggles seems to be able to do 
what water cannot: loosen the grip of these reinforcers.

In any case, if one is not caution about any of these treatments, 
hammers can get ruined. Which is why I have carried forward the 
lesson I learned with lacquer: pick two or three adjacent notes in a 
region with identical tone, treat one of them with a measured dose, 
observe the response, and treat the rest based on that reaction. Like 
pickling out a drill bit for unknown pinblock material (and as far as 
I'm concerned, the combination of any fresh set of hammers and the 
rest of the piano is an unknown), finding your way around one 
selected samples cuts back on the number of hammers you'll 
inadvertently mess up.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter

"There are fifty ways to screw up on this job. If you can think of 
twenty of them, you're a genius......and you aint no genius"
     ...........Mickey Rourke to William Hurt, in "Body Heat", discussing arson.