Thanks to ALL. This has been a very informative set of emails.
Confession: the many 'hands' that have been in this piano are mine, and that's because it is my piano, cost only $3000 (not that there is any 'only' about 3K my budget); was bought used but played well until I decided to become a piano tuner.
Yes I did use the long mute strip to tune it. Seemed like an okay idea.
After my first tuning, I noticed the damage to the mid-mid-range dampers, and thought it could not be too hard to replace them, especially only just a few.
Since then a series of events probably started by the fact that I couldn't get a tech's account with Yamaha and when I did they still took forever to fill my orders, resulted in my trying to use a few of the very high-dampers to replace the mid-range ones I could not get from Yamaha. That's why you might notice in the photo that there are six missin dampers at the very top.
Then covid hit and I realized it was going to be a long time before people started hiring me to tune their pianos.
So I went through and tried to do all the basic stuff--new whippens, new hammers, a new bass-string, and so on.
But those mid-range dampers never got back to working right.
I still cannot get Yamaha to actually fill an order for me. The proper felt for that piano would be a great idea, but the whole process has been one of 'making do' with generic parts.
Onward and upward, though! I am hopeful that I can at least get the piano back to the point where all the keys play a musical sound that stops quickly enough that I can convince my wife that I DO still know how to play the thing!
I am terminating this thread at this point.
Thanks to all.
h
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Hank Mooney
San Francisco CA
415-640-2731
[Hank]
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