Ca pin block repair-broken tuning pin

[antares@euronet.nl]

Hi y' all,


This evening I read this thread about CA in regard to pin blocks, and 
suddenly I sort of woke up and I wondered a bit about the following: If 
and when a tuning pin is turning loose in the pin block, one could 
compare it with a nail, driven into a wall or a wooden pane a long time 
ago. After all that time it comes loose and we can almost pull it out 
of the wall by hand.
Isn't it more logical to take the next sizer tuning pin and just re-pin 
and re-string the piano?

I am aware of the fact that this may sound extremely dumb, considering 
all the mails about ca glue etc etc... but indeed, why turning a 
pinblock into a piece of resin when all we need to do is re-pin and 
re-string this piano?

I am happy to live far away from the US.. nobody can hurt me, flame 
suits not even necessary and so on.
Feeling safe, but wondering why, oh why.......................


André Oorebeek





On zondag, sep 14, 2003, at 20:33 Europe/Amsterdam, Susan Kline wrote:

> Hi, Tom
>
> It might have been okay. Might the pin with the bronze bushing have
> been okay without the CA, too?
>
> Have you ever tried to find out _HOW LITTLE_ CA will still get the 
> piano
> tunable? Focus on the worst notes, leave the okay ones, see how little
> will get the bad ones to hold, etc.? Since in small amounts CA sets up
> so quickly, you can treat some "offenders" and try them out a few 
> minutes
> later. And if you come back in six months, and find some more loose 
> pins,
> or find that the ones you have treated with just a few drops are a 
> little
> bit loose, you can just add a little bit more. In my experience, using
> minimal amounts of CA on loose pins is a repeatable repair -- though
> I have hardly needed to repeat it.
>
> I think that we are still approaching this job as if it were the old
> pinblock treatment: tilting the upright or removing the action of
> the grand, and flooding the whole pinblock area with glycerin and
> alcohol. Since this job was such a mess, and since the piano needed
> to sit for a week before we could tune it, we had to do the whole
> process at one sitting, and we'd put in as much as we could get
> the pinblock to accept, and then a little extra, which we had to
> clean up.
>
> CA is different. We can use it without tilting, on individual pins, 
> and tune
> the notes a half hour later. If a pin later gets loose again, we can 
> slip
> a few more drops in. Since CA follows cracks, if the pin is loose, the
> CA can creep around it and and find the open space. This means that we 
> don't have
> to do an all-or-nothing job. I think we might consider just what we 
> want
> to end up with, as well. Do we want a wooden pinblock where the pins 
> are
> still basically contacting wood (most of them, anyway) but where the
> cracks and delaminations have been sort of stuck back together, or do
> we want a kind of a resin pinblock, where the whole thing is saturated 
> with
> CA? Do we want to turn a block into a kind of hard plastic?
>
> It's true that all the other tuning pins didn't break: but just one is
> a major pain. I was tuning a 1970's Steinway B this summer and
> only one agraffe broke, too, but if I had installed them, I
> wouldn't have called it a successful job.
>
> Best,
>
> Susan
>
>
>
> At 01:19 PM 9/14/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>> Susan,
>>         Second question first: I usually do two passes with the thin 
>> CA
>> as long as it is "draining" past the bushing. If the stuff pools up in
>> my opinion it's not going to help. As to the approx amount I usually
>> apply about 2 oz.  Question 2: I swabbed the hole after the pass with
>> the drill bit because I scraped up the hole by driving the mangled pin
>> through. Courage? Not really. 234 pins did not seize up with CA so 
>> this
>> hole W/O  bronze bushing figured to react normally. Maybe the 3/0 pin
>> would have been fine without the CA.
>>         Tom Driscoll RPT
>
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