David, people have skirted around the question of papering the Steinway rosette flanges and using burn in on the shanks, but no one has described how to do this.
Spacing: you can use half length strips under the flanges to change the hammer alignment to the strings. I call if half-papering. Take a normal travel strip -- gummed paper, I like the brown paper package tape which can still be found on Ebay. I used to use the margins of postage stamps bought in a sheet, which were a little thinner and very handy, but all stamps are now self-adhesive. Anyway, take a normal travel strip and tear it in half, so you have two short pieces. You put one piece under the front side of the flange and the other under the opposite rear side. This fools the flange into thinking that the rail is a very slightly different angle, and the hammer will move to one side. I've heard of doing this with only one half strip, but I think it's more secure and stable by using both, on opposite sides.
Of course, as I was taught early on, you always paper the flange and never the rail. And you always use travel strips with glue on them, not just loose paper or card, like I see in some Asian grands, where you take off a flange and the travel paper falls off.
Also, the screw holes are just slightly larger than the shanks of the flange screws, so you can pull them just a little to one side or the other. In a pinch, you can enlarge the screw holes by a tiny amount with a round file.
Once the hammers are fairly well aligned with the strings, you can move on to traveling. This is done by paper, but the approach is different. You use a full strip on one side or the other. It can go right over the half papering if necessary. For a minor change, you can use a narrower strip, glued toward the edge of the flange.
As Joel Rappaport pointed out in an excellent seminar I attended, traveling like this will slightly change the angle of the hammer because the flange will be not quite as horizontal as before. This can then be fixed by burning the shanks with an alcohol lamp, twisting them slightly, or by pulling the hammers off and regluing them. If the original installation was poorly done, you might need to do some of this anyway, but you'll need to do it after the spacing and traveling are finished.
As for centering the shanks over the wippens, the wippens also sometimes need spacing with paper. In rare instances, they can use a little bit of traveling too, but not nearly as much or as often as the hammers do. Since they are 90 degrees different than the hammer flanges, the approach is different. With the wippens, half-papering would travel them, but also make them tilt just slightly. To space them, you use a full strip (two if necessary, of course) under one side of the flange. Having a mental picture of which way the flange will change its angle when spaced with a strip of paper will show you which side to put the paper on. When spacing wippens, you also have to consider where the jack tender is meeting the letoff button, though there is some leeway. If a hammer is well traveled and spaced properly, and the wippen has been spaced so the shank is centered above it, but the jack tender is way off center, consider whether traveling the wippen might help.
Once again, you can get some spacing of a wippen by slightly enlarging the size of the wippen flange screw hole so you can simply pull the flange slightly to the side.
As for voicing, if these are New York hammers (or American hammers, relatively cold pressed and not as dense and heavy as hot-pressed hammers), repeatedly stabbing the shoulders will likely not do you much good. I get better results by using a chopstick tool, also known as the Hart voicing tool, which is a brass rod with one needle in the end. It's called a chopstick tool because originally people would put a short length of needle into the end of a Chinese bamboo chopstick. I keep the needle quite short, between 1/4" and 1/3". The method I use on NY Steinway hammers, best when they are relatively new, is to put the needle in at a fairly shallow angle starting slightly in front of the string groove. Of course this is done with the action in place, a great convenience. If you mute the note so you can play each string alone in turn, you can spot which is the brightest and needle that one first. Ideally, they should all sound about the same. If the note is still stubbornly too bright, you can get somewhat more effect by going straight down into the hammer vertically.
Of course you'll also need to check the shift voicing, which may call for needling vertically, in between the string grooves. And if the left side of the hammer hasn't been slightly chamfered with a sandpaper hammer file, it sometimes has a little bit of lacquer on it which can be very bright in shift position. Normally this would be taken care of at installation, but it sounds like you can't count on that.
Also, it sounds like the hammers have been filed, and not to the ideal shape, which is just slightly diamond shaped. The shape comes from the way the hammers are pressed. It's what you get if your filing exactly removes a layer without cutting into a lower one. If you have a lot of changes to make with the spacing and traveling, and the hammers have already been filed, you will need to go over the hammer shaping to assure that the strike surface is completely horizontal and mated to the strings. The more the piano has been played with the hammers off angle and spaced badly, the more work you'll have to do to shape them and voice them after making corrections.
For the top octave, which often has been over-juiced, especially for a private home, I like putting just a few drops of vodka (VERY LITTLE) right in the string grooves. There is little felt up there, and it is hardened by the juice which makes it difficult to fluff up with a needle and easy to tear. Using the vodka very modestly can take away the "ice pick in your ears" sounds without damaging or removing any felt. Also, while it will smell somewhat like a bar room for a short time, the vodka evaporates leaving nothing behind, and it is non-toxic. All it does is change the texture of the felt just slightly, and only the outer layer. I don't use "real" vodka. I take 190 proof bulk ethanol from the liquor store, and cut it half and half with tap water, keeping it in a dropper bottle in a ziploc bag in my kit. A little goes a long way. It's also handy to soften glue if you need to extract an upright hammer from a broken shank, and it's a mild disinfectant if you get a minor cut.
If a few hammers are more dull or over-needled compared to their peers, you can often even them up, getting them a little bit brighter, by pressing the string down halfway back (or wherever you can reach) with one hand, while banging the note hard with the other hand. It is relatively temporary, but can greatly aid evenness of voicing. I've never knocked a note out of tune doing this, but of course you'll have to check for this.
All of this sounds like a lot of work, and of course it is the first few times you do it, but I've found it to be highly satisfying, giving excellent results. It's like buying yourself some high quality tools, and keeping them in perfect order and condition, and knowing how to get the best from them. Expensive, but worth every penny.
I'm enclosing 2 photos of a voicing block given to me by Ted Sambell. These started being used by technicians around Calgary, Alberta. I believe it was invented by Chris Gregg. It can file the strike face of a hammer, any string chosen, or any two strings, or all at once, to restore an exact angle and to correct string mating. A great time-saver. This one is made of cocobolo but ordinary softwood works fine. It's made using a large Forstner bit, with strips of 400 grit sandpaper glued in the curved grooves. There are four curves, two on each side, of differeing depths. The photos show it on a board with 1/2 inch squares in it, to give scale.
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Susan Kline
Philomath, Oregon
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-25-2019 15:08
From: David Pinnegar
Subject: Steinway M hammer refurbishment and alignment
I'm writing clumsily on a tablet waiting for the plane home having been to the Cannes Film Festival and just popped over to see my friend in a neighbouring town. I have a collection of instruments at Hammerwood Park in Sussex which I tune and with the expertise of a wonderful friend not unknown to PTG members are maintained. I'll tune for whoever asks me but I'm not in the refurbishment business commercially.
I'm not angling for a refelting job by Abel. But on my 1885 Bechstein the result of my technician friend known here was truly impeccable.
But having done a tuning well regarded by the owner of the Steinway and the concert pianists who have sampled it, it's a disappointment to me to see me friend spend out on what was intended to be top work by someone who clearly doesn't know about Steinway.
I'm now starting to have sympathy with Steinway for incorporating booby traps to catch out incompetence or unwillingness to find out.
After this technician had burnished the strings some treble strings have been self beating which made my second tuning more difficult. The first tuning before the work was a dream to do, but the second the instrument fought me. Reblitz gives a clue to my suspicion but cannot comment further until I go back in a month or two and inspect the bridge. I didn't want to believe it but finding the instrument left as finished with uneven voicing and the una corda not working suggests a level of........
In suspicion that the technician doesn't really know what he's doing I asked the question about sanding the new hammers. The tops are now rather more circular than olive shaped.
The sound is hard, unpleasant and just two notes in the treble octave are sweet. The tone doesn't vary between soft and loud, merely more piercing.
Best wishes
Original Message------
Rick,
If I understand your comments, I believe you have missed the fundamental point. It is a given that all pianos will need some spacing of many of their shanks. The basic flat rail design requires loosening of the screw move the flange left or right retighten screw. The flange-to-rail contact area is 100%. With Steinway the flange-to-rail contact point is limited to the travel paper points only. Also, I thought about the rest rail verses cushion design. I don't see your point.
Roger