C/A glue [how much ????? .. and general rant ..]

[Bill Ballard]

At 9:38 PM -0700 8/31/03, Susan Kline wrote:
>>"Round here we don't talk unless we can improve on the silence."
>>     ...........Ron Rude, local Public Radio Commentator.
>>+++++++++++++++++++++
>
>Oh, geez, I thought I WAS improving on the silence!
>
>So, Mr. Bill, do you have any opinions on the substance of what I wrote?

Your post was as always full of wisdom drawn from years of hands-on 
experience. Especially the stuff delivered "from the soapbox": tools 
such as the electric tea kettle, the "zapper", and CA for pinblocks 
have such power that they may at first sight have the appearance of a 
five pound sledge. You know what they say, "When all you've got is a 
hammer, everything looks like a nail". As point out, it's up to us to 
notice that that these tools do their best work with a minute tap.

It never occurred to me that all that extra CA pour into a pinblock 
might be like the second of two aspirins the doctor recommends. Both 
the doctor and the pharmaceutical company know it's the first aspirin 
which does the job, and the second aspirin can't be absorbed by the 
metabolism and is dumped out with the trash. I held off using CA 
because I didn't know how it worked. (It's capillary action is well 
known, but what is it doing after the volatiles have left and it's 
turned solid? Does it pull split wood back together? Will the thin 
stuff when cured, fill gaps? If it's a gap filler, what happens 
during the dry season when the pinblock wood relaxes its pressure on 
the tuning pin? Will the CA recede with the wood or will it continue 
to fill the gap in a way which maintains the pressure (friction grip) 
on the tuning pins? Does it reinforce the wood in a way fundamentally 
different from the epoxy used by restorers of antique pianos?)

I never did get these questions answered, but since March of this 
year, I've had five disastrous pinblocks made tunable. All five were 
beyond driving the pins (my long-standing remedy), one didn't even 
respond to o'sized pins. All of the owners had lived (for months or 
years) with my warning that the next inevitable step was o'sized pins 
(or where that was already done, a new block). And all five were 
overjoyed when I came back to them with the CA remedy (regardless of 
my lack of guarantee of its longevity).

Not knowing anything more about and making the reasonable assumption 
that with such basket-case blocks, more was going to be more, 
especially when the work being done was gap-filling. So the average 
dose among these pianos was ~3 oz. I never had CA drip out the 
underside of the block (all five were grands), although I had 
prepared for that event. So that 3 oz. was clearly all absorbed by 
these blocks. The tuning pin feeling is not the traditional 
steel-in-wood, with the tuning pin twisting until that twist finally 
reaches the bottom end of the pin. The CA'd torque is in the 
neighborhood of 90-100 "/#, but the entire length of the pin turns 
from the outset. What the heck, it works.

On that other five-pound sledge, the electric tea kettle: I used to 
use it all the time when it was first shown to me back in '94. But I 
also found which hammers it worked on and which not. It will for 
instance turn a Renner hammer into a raw NY Steinway hammer, but the 
former will not bloom under reinforcing as will the latter. And the 
resins binding together the felt in a NY Steinway hammer are not 
water soluble, no matter how hot the water. But I've since gone to 
Roger Jolly's manner of applying steam: the water stored in a strip 
of cloth laid on the hammers, and a hammer iron bringing the water to 
steam temperature. Recently I hauled out the tea kettle, but one pass 
told me that steam (no matter how massive) was not going to work. 
It's been 10-12 years since I last used the alcohol/water mix (the 
equivalent of your vodka), but I traded it in for steam which showed 
me its result far quicker that alc/water. However I don't doubt that 
what you do works very well for you.

Susan, you always improve on the silence, especially your own, ie., 
those long stretches when we don't hear from you. I did read your 
entire post and my first reaction was, at 8K that was far more than 
what could be dashed off in 15 minutes. Hence the comment about you 
being trapped indoors this weekend. My apologies for that response to 
he surface appearance for your post farther than its substance.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.


"A jester unemployed is nobody's fool."
     ...........Danny Kaye, in "The Court Jester"
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