Hammer Height for Piano Tuning

Video Transcript

"On behalf of expertvillage.com I'm Tom Flowers of Well Tempered Piano Tuning here to talk to you today about piano tuning and maintenance. Now, as we look at the action, it should a nice orderly appearance which this one does not. There are some things regarding that we're not going to be able to overcome, but many things that we can. At this point in its ninety-eight year history, it's not out of line to simply treat this piano to whatever works best and forgetting about certain regulation and that sort of thing. As you can see, there are a couple of hammers, namely this one and this one, that are too high. These hammers are larger than the others because they were the wrong hammers to put on in the first place. We can't do a lot about that. But surprisingly some of the biggest problems in terms of clicks and just disorderly playing come from something as simple as most of these things being rather loose. As you can figure, the ones that are out of kilter are the ones that are loose and indeed, all you need to do to tighten that is space them where they need to be and simply tighten this particular screw. You may find as a piano ages this much that you may have to use the toothpick and glue principle to tighten the hole, but so far these are tightening up well. Now, underneath each of the mechanisms that we talked about before, the Whippens is the cap stack. It determines the hammer height. It is adjusted with something like this and if you don't have one of these, an icepick will do. It's simply down here where I've identified the key where it's too high, turning clockwise will lower the hammer. If it doesn't lower the hammer, then you have other problems. But typically it will. It's not a particularly fast process. But it's quite a necessary one because the distance from the hammer to the strings will effect the feel of the piano greatly. We're just about there with getting that particular hammer a level with the rest keys in that section. Now, what kind of maintenance a piano needs is really relevant to the demands made on the piano. If it's simply a casual piano for a young student, not a lot. If it's a serious concert player who plays many hours per day, it may need lots of work and fairly often. So going through the same thing here of turning clockwise and lowering this hammer. Adjusting instruments in this fashion is not particularly expensive. When you start getting into real money is when the word "replace" comes about."