One of my favorite classes at the recent St Louis convention was the one given by Melanie Brooks and John Gallen of Brooks Ltd. During the class One of them mentioned a new tool Scott Jones has developed for re-weighting grand keyboards. Of the many bits of good fortune associated with my career at Steinway, one of the greatest was that I got to work there at the same time as Mr. Jones. As I was going to be doing a couple of jobs with new hammers and attendant touch weight resets, when I got home I went to
pitchlock.com and ordered one. The cost was minimal and the potential upside seemed worth the time to investigate. Holy Cow was it ever.
The way it works is that you record the down weight of the action as it is (after addressing all friction issues in both the keys and the stack). Then you remove the stack and attach the touchscale device to to a backcheck and put the same amount of weight as that recorded earlier for that key on the front of the key (see figure 1). Then slide the weight on the Touchscale forward or back until the key balances. That is until both ends of the key are in mid-air neither rising or falling. This is somewhat easier on keys with conventional balance rails than those with Steinway style half round dowels at the balance point. To change the down weight; substitute your desired gram weight on the front of the key and then add or remove lead from the key until the key balances with the new weight. Repeat 87 times and you're done. This week I re-weighed a Steinway B in about 2 hrs and when I re-installed the stack (once!) the down weights were +- 1 gram of what I had measured with the Touchweight device. For the record +- 2 grams is the standard the Steinway factory used for years regarding down weight. I've only mentioned down weight in this post because that's what the Touchscale helps you set. I'm hopeful that anyone re-weighting keys is fully aware that the key has to go up as well as down.
The device isn't perfect (yet). On big pianos like the model B I found a need to add more weight (see figures 4&5) for the bottom half of the keyboard. I solved this by smacking a 14 gram weight with a hammer until it was flat and adding it to the device. It would also be helpful if the brass slide had some scale markings to assist with more precise fore and aft movement of the weight. All that aside, this tool is one more example of my friend Scott coming up with something so simple and elegant that looking at it for the first time you can't help but wonder how no one thought of it before.
Thanks to Melanie and John for bringing this tool to my attention. Thanks to Scott Jones for being a genius (Don Mannino/Tony Jaras level. Stephen Hawking don't get nervous.) so I don't have to be one in order to work like one.
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Karl Roeder
Pompano Beach FL
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