At 03:36 -0500 16/11/2010, tnrwim at aol.com wrote: >I don't know what the Steinway word for whippen is, since I believe >corporal punishment of factory workers is now against the law, but I >believe the part most piano technicians call a wippen*, is called a >repetition lever at Steinway. > >* While some technicians call a repetition lever a whippen, it is >not the correct spelling of this part of the a piano. This, >according to Jim Ellis, RPT. The American term, however spelt, is a corruption of the German word for see-saw, Wippe and/or the German verb Wippen, which means, among other interesting meanings, to balance. In the old days some technicians called them wipps. In any case there is no h in the word. There is no law that says piano technicians must be illiterate. Steinway's terms are a joke. They even cast one of their famous illiterate inventions into their plate : the "Capo d'Astro", which has no meaning at all. Herrburger, the great action-maker, refers to the main body of the lever as the "rider" and to the sprung lever as the "repeating-lever" In England we generally call the whole thing just the "lever", short for "intermediate lever", and the repeating-lever the "repetition-lever" or "cradle". JD
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