Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Hammer suggestions: modern board

With all the junk in my signature, it's easily missed. No worries.



Sure, it's definitely possible. My final project at school was an action overhaul on a very old Canadian Heintzman. Even with the old, heavily grooved hammers, the piano sounded decent. With new key tops, bushings, regulation, and Ronsen Bacon felt hammers, it sounded better than the much newer Yamahas and Kawais in the practice rooms.

I wonder if you noticed. All of the Heintzman & Co models were fitted with hammer sets from Bohne & Co that was Weikert felt.

Bohne & Co Est. 1891 manufactured hammers in Canada until 1964.They are still in operation but are now known as Bohne Spring LTD.

I'm not entirely confident that the hammers were original to the piano because the hang job was not of a quality I'd associate with Heintzman. The shanks were definitely original, though.

Oddly, many premium pianos in the early 1800's used elastic wood for the hammer-shanks.

They went to a lot of trouble to do so and stopped primarily because of broken shanks when pianos became heavy and pianists more forceful

If you look at how a golf club is built, it has a flexible shank, for a good reason.

Four Young Chang/Weber grands of my design (the 150, 157, 175 and 185) have floating soundboards in the bass section as do all of the new verticals.

And don't sell the multi-laminated soundboard short. We have built high-performance prototype pianos using carefully designed laminated soundboard panels that perform at least as well as their counterparts using solid spruce panels.

ddf

Unless it is specifically designed to give good, broad-spectrum response—most are not—laminated soundboard panels tend to be a bit stiffer than comparable solid spruce panels. At least in some directions.

You’ve not told us what the scale tensions are like; it does make a difference. But in general these boards do not respond well to overly hard hammers. My first choice would be something like a Ronsen hammer pressed with Weikert felt. Large or small depending on the size and scaling of the piano.

As to floating soundboards; the four smaller new Young Chang/Weber grands and all of the new Young Chang/Weber uprights use floating soundboard systems. All of these—except for the Albert Weber line which is made in Korea—are made in China.

ddf

Quite right. I’m assuming, since the hypothetical piano has a laminated soundboard panel, it is a relatively small one. (Not many pianos above about 180 cm or so have laminated soundboard panels.) This being the case I’d not worry about power—in the intended environment power will take care of itself—and concentrate on timbral palette. Hence my choice of the smallest practical cold-pressed hammer using a felt known for its excellent resilient qualities.

ddf

And here I'll introduce my piano hammer "koan" (Buddhist thought-teaser riddle):

If a brick is hard and a pillow is soft, what is a basketball?

In almost all discussions of hammer qualities the parameters are limited to only two dimensions: mass and hardness. But, to quote Yoda, there is another: . . .. . . . Elasticity.

This parameter is either completely ignored or confounded with the hard/soft dimension.

This is not to disagree that various technicians have found particular hammer sets that have worked better or worse in given situations. But the conclusions about hard/soft and high/low mass may be improperly drawn since elasticity can affect how mass and hardness contribute to hammer function in a similar fashion to how mass, speaking length and tension interact in string scaling.

Moving forward I hope to see this variable recognized and accounted for in ways that it has not heretofore.

Elasticity, or hammer resilience has been recognized for at least a century. And it has been written about in some depth by many researchers and authors. In the book, Piano Tone Building there is a discussion on the difficulty of measuring and quantifying the characteristic of resilience in the piano hammer. The desire to measure this actually led to the invention of the resiliometer—go to http://www.ccsi-inc.com/p-resilience-shore-resiliometer.htm— which has become a standard measuring instrument for a variety of materials and products.

It turns out that this is not the best way to measure the resilience of a piano hammer. A better method carefully measures hammer velocity and tracks measured hammer impact force against contact time but this requires a specialized test setup that is neither easy nor cheap to set up. See Dan Russell’s research papers for more information on this measurement technique.

As well, it is a subject I’ve touched on from time to time both on this list and on Piano Forum.

ddf

Thanks Del, and for the info on the Weber floating board

Yes, indeed. Take the force vs. time data, run it through the Fourier Integral, and you'll find out the frequency response of the forcing function that results from the hammer blow.

Your work on Young Chang seem to be noticed, a customer of mine just told me he was amazed by some Young chang he played lately.

WIth floating soundboard the stiffness of the bass region of the soundboard is not a problem, I believe it may really help.

I had not the chance to test one lately, will let you know. I was dubitative when I heard my customer, but he is a really talented and exigent pianist, have a Grotrian Steinweg and an Euterpe, so to say, so I can trust him.
Thanks for the informations,

Is the action better now ? the wood was really instable in the Young Chang grands, some 10 20 years ago (shanks and flanges, pinning problems, warping and twisting where common)

I heard that Samick produce now an action line that is named Flemming (the old name of an old Eastern Europe action, owned now by W; Steinberg, hence that production by Samick) but I doubt those parts are used in Young Chang (?) /Weber ... (no Weber in Europe for what I know)

Greetings

Just to try and get back to the original question, I've had the impression that newer Yamaha pianos as well as others which use a stiff relatively inert-sounding board do not sound as good when they are voiced to be dark. They sound quite boring and lifeless.

Older pianos with vintage soundboards tend to have more resonances in the soundboard and the soundboard wood, being more of a seasoned tone-wood on the old pianos, tends to add harmonics to dark hammers, making the tone more interesting and complex.

The lower partials which are closer to the fundamental, on a perfect, rigid piano with a tight-sounding soundboard tend to be so simple and predictable sounding that the sound can be lifeless. To make the sound more rich you need to calculate the soundboard as a resonator IMO

The other way to make the sound more interesting is to make it brighter and percussive so that the shock of the hammer will set the string into oscillation in a more unpredictable, more dynamic fashion. The problem though is that you sacrifice dynamic shading, singing tone, roundness etc.,