Grand plate clean-up

[Farrell]

Three cheers for the suggestion below! Gold strings, agraffes, and tuning pins look ugly. I've got a Baldwin L that I service where someone painted the plate and agraffes and strings. Now the gold paint on the string has crept up into the agraffe - makes string rendering rather difficult (although it has helped my brush up on my four-letter-word vocabulary).

Bottom line (IMHO): either leave the "antique look" as is, or do it right.

Terry Farrell
  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Renaud" <drjazzca@yahoo.ca>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 8:47 PM
Subject: Re: Grand plate clean-up


> Consider, since your replacing the bass strings
> anyway, and treble string is so cheap, the economy
> of replacing all string. 
> 
>  Just 6 hours installing treble string. Probably
> just a few more then the prep., tape, and spraying
> problems with string on.
> 
>  I imagine several hours trying to clean and prep the
> plate for spraying, awkwardly working around old 
> string, attempting to keep string free of cleaner,
> wrapping carefully, removing wrapping. It will be
> obvious some surface is sprayed, some not. 
>  
>  I steel wool and spray the plate with engine cleaner,
> wipe well, and wipe with alcohol. I spray with a can.
> Plate out allows to polish or replace bolts,
> hardware, looks good. Very quick, a couple hours
>   Having a hard time wrapping my mind around the
> problems of cleaning and  spraying a plate with
> strings in. Seems like it could take time anyway,
> expecially   to tape and clean up plate hardware.  
> 
>  I have a Bluthner downstairs, despite some poor souls
> best efforts, it has more then a sprinkle of gold all
> over the pins and strings.
> 
>  I'd suggest it may take an extra $40 of string,
> and an extra 3 hrs of time to change all the string.
> With the plate out it is so very quick to spray, no
> taping, better cleaning and preping, fully refinished.
> 
> All that saved time would go on stringing.
> 
> Of course there is then an extra couple hours of
> chipping, seating, & tuning. Did one last week.
>  From zero to A445 tuning, three passes over 2 hours.
> The next day it was A440. 
> 
>                              One opinion
>                              Cheers
>                              Dave Renaud
>                              RPT   
>                              Canada                   
>  
> 
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