I just installed a new set of Renner Blue Points for the first time today and thought I'd post a review of sorts. The Hammers went on a 193 cm Shulze Pollman made in 2000 immortalized last December in the 'Quiz for hammer makers' thread on this site. I used the Renner Blue Point ( RBP from now on) hammers because I saw that they are made with the Weikert Spezial felt. My experience with the Ronsen hammers made with Weikert felt has been really exceptional as regards tone production and especially as regards wear. I wanted something a little more aggressive than the Ronsens but not as brilliant as Abel Naturals. I hoped the RBPs would fall somewhere in between. That seems to be exactly where they are.
I ordered the hammers bored to string height minus hammer flange center pin height with the good folks at Renner USA doing the tapering and tailing generically for me. I sent the angle specs directly measured from the piano and they are odd enough that Renner USA called me to see if I hadn't really meant to ask for something more conventional. The RBPs came in visibly different from other Renner hammers I have used in the past. They have a distinct "diamond" shape reminiscent of the shape one finds in the Steingraber and Sons pianos. They also have a rougher outer layer of felt than normally seen on Renner hammers. They have the Renner T Clasp so I don't anticipate a follow up to the Quiz any time soon. The weight was well controlled with .7 grams being the largest difference between any two adjacent hammers. The boring and tailing was done beautifully and helped make installation a low stress event.
I found that I wanted to shape these a bit more than I have on Ronsen hammers. I did a rough pass with 220 grit followed by a finer pass with 1000 grit. If Don Mannino had been looking over my shoulder I might have followed up with another pass with 1500 or 2000 but Don wasn't around and my commitment to sloth and indolence is well documented. I did no pre-voicing in the shop prior to bringing the action back to the piano.
At the piano after fitting the hammers to the strings I found that the initial tone was indeed somewhere between Ronsen Weikert and Abel Naturals. I did find that the tone benefited from some conservative shoulder needling along the lines of what Fred Sturm described recently in the Voicing Kit thread with the difference that the RBPs are quite easy to insert needles into so there's no need for the standing and leaning described there. I would not want to start hammering away at the shoulders in the manner of Andre Oorobeek on Yamaha hammers. Perhaps due to the smaller contact area provided with the "diamond" shape, the tone in the treble was pretty easy to bring up. The bass took a bit more needling in the battery area to balance with the rest of the scale. I did not need to use any hardeners to get a good strong tone throughout.
As with most anything piano related your results may differ widely from mine. And these are just the musings of one shade tree mechanic. I did however find these hammers to be a very nice addition to my array of choices of what to use on a particular piano in a given situation
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Karl Roeder
Pompano Beach FL
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