steaming

[Dave Nereson]

Welp, I checked all the archives (I'm pretty sure) on hammer steaming, and the gist was that steaming is meant to soften, not harden hammers (which I surmised), although no one said that explicitly -- the general reason given for the process was to "improve the tone".   And there never was a definite answer as to what happens to the tone when the moisture from the steam evaporates from the hammer.  Does the hammer stay soft or does the drying cause the wool to shrink and get hard and have a "bangy" tone again?  I didn't see any definite answers in the archives, unless I'm missing something.  I have steamed hammers that were extremely hard and it did soften down the tone.  That was a while back and the customer hasn't called back to say it's strident again, but then many piano owners don't notice it's out of tune until it's really bad, either.  --Dave Nereson, RPT