Here is a puzzler I encountered last week. Someone may get it right away, but it took me some head scratching to figure out, and I had never seen it before: The piano was a circa 1930 generic little american grand. I was called in to repair the lyre (the regular tuner is blind and does not do that type of repair work). Of course, assessing damper function was part of the job, and it was reasonably OK except for the puzzler: Whenever I depressed the sustain pedal (after repairing the lyre) two adjacent bass bichords sounded, as if they had been plucked. However, when I reached inside and lifted either or both of the underlevers by hand, there was no plucking sound. Just to rule out some things, the underlever leads and flanges were tight, the guide rail bushings were worn but not terrible, and the damper wires were not touching or almost touching the strings. The damper heads and felts were not interfering with their neighbors. The damper felts were old, but no more so than their quiet neighbors. There was no sostenuto mechanism. That's where I was when my head scratching commenced, as shall yours, if you're in an itchy frame of mind. Joe DeFazio Pittsburgh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20100303/53d08914/attachment.htm>
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