Balance rail felt

[Ron Nossaman]

>Since I've been doing it this way, I don't have to waste time "threading" 
>the various punchings on a rod/taking them off the rod, etc. One of 
>Murphy's laws is that you'll be out of the ones, on the rod,  that you 
>need.<G> I must say I'm not too keen on the shop floor thingee!<G>
>Best Regards,
>
>Joe Garrett, R.P.T.


Well Joe, there IS the bother of having to thread the punchings on the rod 
- as opposed to the easy convenience of slipping a hollow punch over each 
center rail pin and swinging a dead blow hammer 88 times. I can see how 
you'd get spoiled pretty quickly by that kind of luxury. By the way, I have 
a half dozen of these rods, not just one, each with somewhere between 90 
and 100 punchings on it, so I'm not going to run out of punchings on THE 
rod unless I get a pretty strange piano - in which case I'll dip into the 
next rod's worth. I take the one that's been in the drawer the longest, use 
the punchings off of it, reload it, crank down the nut, and put it at the 
end of the line so it can age a bit before it comes up on the wheel again. 
I've never tested compressibility against one fresh out of the bag to see 
just how effective this actually is, but I think it helps and is similar to 
the compression they accumulate in use in the action. I've not tried 
whacking them. I might like it.

Ron N