Inertia, was "Grand Touch"

[Porritt, David]

One indication of its performance is that Steinway had a patent on the
accelerated action that covered the inertia issue and stressed the
importance of having more lead closer to the balance rail.  However, now
they don't seem to be actually placing their leads closer to the balance
rail so I have to assume that they didn't think it really important from
a practical standpoint.  Speaking of being practical, one could bunch
the leads close to the balance rail so densely that you weakened the key
stick.  While minimizing inertia the best, it would introduce other
problems!

dp

David M. Porritt
dporritt at smu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On
Behalf Of Ron Nossaman
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 10:39 PM
To: Pianotech List
Subject: Re: Inertia, was "Grand Touch"


> Hi Ron,
> 
> I think the piano action as we have it today is
> reasonably close to its optimum.  There may be a "10%
> window" to play around with to improve the typical
> settings.  So, we are not talking about dropping the
> action inertia into half.  That makes it reasonable to
> explore the key leads for the final optimization.

Hi Vladan,
That's exactly what I'm after. How fine a hair is this 
splitting for the quite possibly disproportionate press it 
gets on list? Where does this practically belong in the action 
function triage hierarchy? Is it fundamental, or incidental-if 
we have the slack to consider it as important esoterica? 
What's the real smoke/flame ratio, or is there one?


> As I mentioned, I have seen the spectrum from no key
> lead to lots of it, and it is definitely noticable. 
> These were well controlled experiments; the actions
> all had similar hammer weights and ratios.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Vladan

Which is why I ask. I'd like to see some real cause and effect 
relationships connecting here, if anyone has information that 
intersects.

Ron N