Conrad, Mike, and Wim, Good to know you think the pounding and tension lowering will give the strings a few more years. I had originally planned to clean the strings, but with the startling success I won't follow up. Leave success alone. Should have mentioned that this is a 30 year old 45" that is played hard, but not 24/7. With this type of playing I'm hoping this will keep the strings moving and shake out a few more sugar crumbs. I normally do the overhand knot and put on a turn as Mike mentioned, but this being a low budget repair I went for the quick fix. I was shocked at the results. If anyone has this situation I would recommend trying one or two strings. Like Conrad said you can feather the sound by working on fewer strings to blend the string output. Thanks for your responses. Joel -- Joel A. Jones RPT Assistant Director - TEAM 2 00 3 July 2 - 6 Dallas, TX http://www.ptg.org/conv.htm jajones2@facstaff.wisc.edu On 5/10/03 4:39 AM, "Conrad Hoffsommer" <hoffsoco@martin.luther.edu> wrote: > Hi, Joel! > > At 21:30 05/09/2003 -0500, you wrote: >> I began by pounding the key and lowering each string about 1/2 turn >> until it was slack. Continuing to test blow the key a dozen times while >> slack and continuing pounding I then pulled the string up to pitch. >> >> Presto the string had a live, full sound. However, I'm wondering: >> >> 1. What happened to the string to cause it to revive??? > > You scared the **** out of the strings. They thought they were going to be > "eliminated"... More exactly, you literally beat the **** out of > them. I've done this to many upright and grand strings whose only > deadening agent was decades of dust. > >> 2. Will this be a short term fix and the strings become dead again??? > > They'll deaden again when they load up again with detritis. > >> Anybody experienced this bass string revival? > > Years ago, [at least ten] I did some "voicing" on a Welte grand with a very > dead bunch of wound strings. The bass bridge was also shot, so full tone > restoration was not possible. This piano has a number of trichord wound > unisons, so what I did was to thump on all three for the top few, then two > for the next and only one for several unisons. This way I "feathered" the > tone from live plain to dead bridge wound. Voila! No abrupt change. > > The only caveat I would add is that many of these dead string pianos also > have pinblocks which are about to give up the ghost and you may wind up > with a live string which won't stay in tune - ;-{ > YMMV > > > _______________________________________________ > pianotech list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives
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