Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.
Music: Louis Armstrong’s “Complete RCA Victor Recordings
” discs 3 and 4.
” discs 3 and 4.With my shims ready to go, it was time to test them out. I checked the tuning of the middle ‘A’ that I had done the day before, and I found it had disconcertingly slipped. I retuned it and it seemed like it would stick, at least for another day. I moved to the G# below it, where I had already removed one pin and wire. I inserted a shim, made it stick, put the pin in and turned it down. It sort of stuck. Sort of. I put the wire on and tried to tighten it, but alas, it would not hold.
Where one wouldn’t work, maybe two would. So, I put another shim in opposite the first one and tightened the pin. Again, this seemed to work, but it occurred to me that maybe I wanted more wood surface on the pin and less sandpaper and varnish, so stacking the shims might be a better idea. So I removed the pin and found the shims essentially shredding themselves to pieces against the pin.
Not good.
So I stacked a new shim on one of the old ones, inserted and turned the pin, and it held. It took about 25 minutes start to finish, mainly due to having to get the shims positioned correctly, but also wrestling with the existing wire. I did one more in the B-flat range, and that one actually worked. All-in-all, the sandpaper seems like an acceptable solution, but not if I hope to sell the thing someday. I made up my mind to go ahead and buy proper shim material, including some of the collared bushings, just to see if they work any better or worse than the metal shim option, but also to check out their appearance. As I said in my last entry, I’m at the point where I’m just trying to avoid having to redo everything. Hopefully, the “designed as shim material” shim material will be the solution.
Come to think of it, I didn’t swear hardly at all during this session. I was concentrating and checking results and thinking too hard to cuss out my piano. Or it might have been the rum I was drinking…
2 comments:
Not sure from your post exactly what you have used to shim the wrestpins with, but seeing as you mentioned the metal shims I assume if you did use them they failed to work. I can say with confidence that they don't work .... they are terrible. You would be far better off using either veneer or sandpaper shims ... smooth side toward the wrestpin.
Actually, John, I did use the metal shims, and I had great success with them. Problem was, they were so secure, they made adjusting the pin height too difficult. I tried sandpaper first, in the fashion you described, but it shredded and didn't hold. I didn't think of the veneer solution, but that probably would have worked best. Thank you for commenting, though. I hope you continue to read and provide insight. I may very well not be done with square grands...yet. Thanks again.
Post a Comment