[pianotech] Chickering damper blocks

[Delwin D Fandrich]

I thought I'd "modernize" the system and put on a wood dowel and
I-don't-remember-what-brand of pre-made dampers. The problem I had was that
I used the original Chickering damper levers along with the original, rather
light, damper springs. Initially I considered replacing the springs with
something heavier but for reasons I no longer remember that didn't seem
feasible. Besides I liked how the action felt with the light springs.

I didn't weigh the original brass parts and compare them with the wood parts
I used. But the brass parts were quite a bit heavier. Working on the
assumption that Chickering actually understood a bit about what he was doing
I decided to go back to the original brass parts which, if memory serves,
were some different than those shown in the pictures that started this
thread. 

The difference in damping efficiency was dramatic. With the heavier damper
heads and backplates the things damped just fine with the original light
springs. 

I had a similar experience when we were building our upright. The original
Renner damper system simply didn't work no matter how heavy a spring we put
on the things. When we switched to brass damper barrels through the bass we
were able to drop way back on the spring tension and still have good damping
efficiency.

ddf

Delwin D Fandrich
Piano Design & Fabrication
6939 Foothill Court SW, Olympia, Washington 98512 USA
Phone  360.515.0119 — Cell  360.388.6525
del at fandrichpiano.com — ddfandrich at gmail.com

-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Ron Nossaman
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2012 11:27 AM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] Chickering damper blocks

On 12/22/2012 1:09 PM, Susan Kline wrote:
> Heavy enough that he had to put them back on to get the upright to 
> damp properly.
> (Is there another valid measure?)


Odd, I can't hear it from here any more than I can weigh it, and I seem to
remember at least a couple of wood backed dampers that worked quite well.

So I don't have enough information to know.

Ron N