Got the call. It's a Schafer and Sons console, and the keys around middle C are very hard to push down. Ok, that's pretty specific. Likely a pencil or some such. No, the piano had recently been worked on and the tech had taken the action home to fix this very problem, which is still a problem. Ok. Scheduled in. Let's go see. Sitting at the pencil-free piano, I note that EVERYTHING is hard to push down - not just around middle C. It's been like this since they got it, but nobody played it anyway (???) until her daughter started taking lessons recently and was complaining about the touch. Yes, that explains why the problem is around middle C. That's the only place she plays. More mysteries evaporate as I step on the damper pedal and the touch weight suddenly becomes more reasonable. So what did the other tech do? It turns out that she guessed the problem was the Emralon in the spring grooves (???!!!????), so she took the action back to the shop and glued spring punchings in the grooves, on top of the Teflon (with what looked like Elmer's Glue-All), in both the damper levers and hammer butts. She used white on the dampers, and red on the butts. I have no idea why the different colors, but it was kind of festive in a creepy sort of way. In doing so, she both added friction, and increased spring tensions, aggravating the original problem. Good job! I brought the action back, pulled the spring rail, took off the damper levers, removed the spring punchings (would have fallen out by themselves soon) readjusted the damper springs to what I thought felt more reasonable, and reassembled everything. Didn't even require the use of the regulating cat, though I had a few offers and passing inspections through the process. Tomorrow morning, we'll see how it feels in the piano. Some puzzles still remain. First, what conceivable pathological logic process would lead anyone who's been in this business for at least 15 years to the conclusion that springs riding in Emralon coated grooves were causing excessive touch weight? Second, what conceivable pathological logic process would lead anyone of ANY experience level to conclude that adding spring punchings had fixed the problem when pressing down a random key in the middle of the scale would clearly indicate that it hadn't? Stuff like this baffles me, even after seeing it for the 7,012th time (don't get out much). Hey, at least it's about pianos. Ron N
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