I am familiar with two approaches to aligning grand piano hammers to strings. The first, which I see documented in the Steinway Technical Reference Guide, the Kawai service manual, and the summary of Yamaha's 37 steps that appeared some years ago at the back of the Journal, is to center the hammers on the trichords. The other is to place the hammers so that the left string of the trichord is positioned a little closer to the left side of the hammer. A method for setting this up is to place a 1mm spacer between the left end of the keyframe and the block against which it rests, align the hammers such that the edge of the string lines up with the edge of the hammer, then remove the spacer.
Now that I go looking, I'm not turning up any documentation for the second method. Are most of you familiar with both of these approaches? What do you see as the relative merits of each? The second approach has been my default one for a long time, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it is a little idiosyncratic.
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Floyd Gadd
Regina SK
306-502-9103
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