Chip, I've seen a ton of old Chickerings here in their state of origin , but I can't remember seeing that action---especially the adjustable backchecks ! Good Luck. Tom Driscoll I worked on a 1882 Chickering upright last week. It was the owners great-grandfathers. It may be the oldest in our town. It had metal action parts-jacks and back checks. The stickers were round dowels countersunk into the keys. No sticker rail. The capstan screw was inside the drilling. The bass had an over damper system. The hammers, when the did not hit the damper wires, went between the wires. I've never seen anything like this. Not badly out of tune, only ~80 cents flat. Hard to be accurate as A4 hammer shank was broken. A#4 was 20 cents sharp, when measured against A440. I called the owner over and showed her the piano. Six strings were missing. Several bass strings had been spliced. I warned her that I might not be able to do a pitch raise. Lubed the strings at the pins and started out okay.BAM-not good. A few more okay. BAM. Okay, I dropped down to A425. The next bass string was 4 cents flat. BAMMM.I did a quick test and dropped the pitch to A420. This dropped the individual strings ~12-3 cents. The high treble was still ~20 cents flat. Only one string broke there. The bass stringing was as follows: A0-F1 mono chords, F#1-D#2 bi-chords, E2-B4 tri-chords. These were all wound bass strings. Treble tri-chords started at C4 Interesting note. The women's husband was a music teacher (retired). He came in while I was tuning. The piano was last tuned in 1976. That tuner told them the piano was "untunable". Well with the existent strings, it cannot be tuned to A440. The piano is not worth restringing. I did point out that if they were only going to tune it once every generation, the money saved would be less than the cost of restringing <G>. Chip -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100215/f55d2b4f/attachment.htm>
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