hammer travel

[Ric Brekne]

Hi Terry, et al

Havnt read all the many replies yet, so maybe this has already been 
said.. but just so.  I think many folks are not aware that there are at 
least two main schools of thought with respect to hammer travel and  
both have their logic and assets. Put in simplest language,  one school 
believes that hammers should travel straight up with no horizontal 
movement. This means that hammer to string mating has to be accomplished 
by very good correspondance between hammer spacing and string spacing.  
Any errors are corrected for by changing the spacing of either/both 
where possible.  The other school believes that hammer spacing is 
something written in stone.  According to this line of thinking... the 
hammers simply must be spaced perfectly evenly.  Hammer to string mating 
is accomplished by hammer travel and/or string spacing where possible.  
I'm not going to get into trying to defend one over the other.  Rather I 
simply would like to underline that I believe one should adhere to the 
way things were done by the manufacturer... at least in the case of very 
high quality concert instruments.  I find the predictability of this 
kind of adherence to a manufacturers techniques makes for a much quicker 
job when it comes to diagnostics and execution of regulation corrections. 

JMT
Cheers
RicB

Terry the Farrel writes:

     > Maybe I'm missing something here - and maybe I'm just going to
    show off some of my ignorance - hanging hammers is not my expertise
    - but how
     > will bending the shank affect hammer travel? Seems to me if a
    hammer travel has a horizontal component (you don't want any - all
    movement should > be vertical) during its travel through its arc,
    the solution is to travel the hammer/shank/flange by inserting the
    appropriate thickness of traveling paper > under the flange (in this
    case on the bass side of the flange screw). If you bend the shank,
    yes you can move the hammer over one way or another,
     > but it will still have a horizontal travel component.

     > Yes?

     > Terry Farrell