I recently inspected a piano with a birdcage action. The customer was very excited to get it working. I told her it would never work great. She understood.
I gave her an estimate and she agreed on a schedule.
Then I opened the top and saw one of the largest pin block frame seperations I've ever seen.
This is the separation after a no glue repair.
I gave her the price for that and she said go ahead.
I've seen pin block repairs before that were not glued and decided to try the no-glue repair on this piano. There were eight holes for bolts so that was good.
I measured and tried to get bolts that were just long enough. I did not want to start grinding bolts off.
I decided to have the bolts go out the back but you could do it the other way around. We will add a piece of wood trim to stop the bolt ends from scratching the wall.
One pin was very close to the bolt. I had to remove the pin, insert the bolt, and re-insert the pin.
After bolting, we added CA glue because the pins were loose.
Now we're tuning it up to see how high she can go. A tone flat and already one bass string broke. The customer was made aware of that possibility.
The goal is to get it so that each note is working and she can play the piano and it sounds as musical as possible.
Sometimes we have to remember that we are servicing the customer and not just the piano.
Beginning technicians are often advised to initially set F3-A3 to 7 beats per second (bps). Mathematically F3-A3 = 6.9 bps in equal temperament so it’s a good guess.After using the skeleton or contiguous M3’s also known as Jack’s Stack, we can refine F3-A3 to be more what the piano needs, but 7 bps is a
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I often read questions on piano technician forums from technicians asking how to regulate a specific piano. For example, recently someone posted this.“I’m regulating a piano and the book says to regulate blow distance at 1.5 inches”or“I can’t find any regulation specs for this specific piano in any books” The writing of these books implies
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When a string is played, it vibrates in different modes. It can vibrate in one section, two sections, three sections, etc. These modes are called partials or harmonics. The following graphic shows how the harmonics relate above the note A4.When two or more strings are tuned together, all of their partials must have the same frequency
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