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

[Joe And Penny Goss]

Hi Bill,
With CA in my bag of tricks tapping the pins is not done. The tapping in of
a pin causes some  pins to be untunable not becuase of delamination of the
block but becuase the tuning hammer tip will no longer seat on the tuning
pin with the wire arround it blocking the tip.
Joe Goss
imatunr@srvinet.com
www.mothergoosetools.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Ballard" <yardbird@vermontel.net>
To: "Pianotech" <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2003 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: C/A glue [how much ????? .. and general rant ..]


> 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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