Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Continuous Bridge Crack Baldwin SF10

It is quite common to install new bridge caps on old pianos, but the remining must be worth.

(the bridge itself is kept, only the top is changed, the tone generallly appreciate that option
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The cost will vary depending on your local economy, the rates charged by your technician and the extent of the repairs.

This is not an overly complex repair. Baldwin grands do have a propensity for split bridges. When the SF-10 and SD-10 models were introduced they also started using vertically laminated bridges with no caps. Most of the time this worked but sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t the bridges developed cracks in the areas where the bridge pins more-or-less paralleled the lamination lines. Usually these cracks are confined to the upper part of the top treble section.

The best repair is to route down the body of the bridge and install a traditional maple cap of either solid or horizontally laminated construction. This can be done without removing the plate but it is awkward work as access is limited.

If the budget allows it would be best to remove the plate, cap the bridge and restring the piano after installing a new pinblock.

I’d not worry about the string termination pieces overly much. Yes, they were hardened and, over time, they can contribute to a few broken strings here and there. (And, yes, it would have been better had they been cast of silicon bronze and had they used a somewhat shorter duplex length but that is a subject for another thread. They were a good idea, poorly executed.) Still, given the number of these pianos out there in daily use, string breakage has not proven to be all that common a problem unless the hammers are excessively heavy and hard. With hammers of medium density and with some of their excess weight taken out this shouldn’t be a problem. (You might have your technician also check this. Baldwin kind of lost control over this; they are one of the manufacturers I’ve seen chemically hardening Renner Blue hammers! So you may have to include replacing hammers along with the bridge work.)

You might also have your technician check to be sure that the sides of the rim are square to the bottom of the piano and that the rim is not warped and/or twisted. Toward the end Baldwin seems to have lost all control over the moisture content of their wood during construction.

And, while he’s at it, see if he can get some idea of how thick the soundboard panel is. That’s something else they kind of lost control over.

I tend to agree with the others who have suggested that the asking price of $28K is too high. Probably by at least half—give or take. Whatever market value you ascribe to the piano you’ll want to deduct a few thousand—say somewhere between $6K and $10K for repairs.

ddf

It also happen that pianos are kept in the worst environnment possible.

I had to work on a grand koncert Boesenforfer in a theater that spend all winters just on long heaters on an external wall with large windows.

The case warped really a lot , more than a harpsichord, was clearly visible even when looking from the front - up to the keybed where I took off about 1/8 inches of wood at some places to have the action flat (no glide bolts)

But those pianos use a light build with tone wood and maple everywhere...

I was the first tech after 14 years of "maintenance" by the local Boesen importer, that exprimed concerns about the location of the piano when unused...

About fifteen years ago I lost a customer over a similar situation.

New SF10 in a concert auditorium to be used by the local music and arts council/association. I am summoned to tune the new piano and I discover the splits in the upper treble. Did I mention NEW piano - less than a year old at the time. I sent a written notation, so that the owner group could use it as leverage for a warranty swap-out of the piano. The dealer got involved (obviously) and the head tech at Baldwin agreed with the dealer: "All it needs is some epoxy in the cracks. It's a fine instrument."

My simple reply was that it needed to either be swapped out (best solution on a NEW expensive concert instrument), or the bridge needed conventional capping to solve the issue.

Guess who lost out on that deal? I never was called by that customer again. (And I sure didn't get any service work from the dealer.) In fact, I don't even know what became of the situation in the long run. Of course, all I had told them was exactly what has been said in this thread. I was shocked to find out Baldwin at that time wouldn't do better at standing by their product. Duh.

Of course that could lead to a thirty-something-year-ago Steinway tale of a similar nature, but I will spare you all that one for now.

The needling from behind is excellent to gain a richer spectra from hammers yet pre voiced enough and having too soft and uneffective basses (grand)

I did not thought of inserting a so long needle in a vertical usually I do that under the shoulders more radially than straight .

It seem to be done often on Yamaha verticals U series, while I nerver seen a Yamaha tech doing so only the shape of the felt show that some work have been done there. Preserve the outer core hence better rebound at low speed.

Phil,
Sometime later (August, 1993) the arts council called me for what I assumed was a "second opinion". I came up with the same conclusion you did and also sent Baldwin a detailed description of the situation. About a month later, I received a letter of thanks from the council president informing me that Baldwin had agreed to deliver a brand new concert grand. I later went back and tuned it. Haven't heard from them since. The old building was drafty and the upper area was full of bats. I called several times over the years to have the thing tuned, but never went back. "Nobody ever plays it." was the usual answer.

Wow, times passes fast. I hadn't actually looked to see if I still had record on that. So it was 20+ years! I had been tuning there for a few years up until that happened. It appears that no one has been tuning since, unless something has changed more recently.

What a waste of a fine instrument! Good for Baldwin. May what is left of the company name rest in peace (or in pieces, if you will). Thank goodness that there are many fine Baldwins to be restored!

Del, my technician also mentioned potential issues that could come up from Baldwin's use of the "floating soundboard" during that era. Is this an additional issue I should be concerned about.
Plus, in your opinion, with a proper rebuild does this instrument have the potential to be an excellent instrument?
Craig

Baldwin did not use a "floating" soundboard but I know what he means. In their smaller grands the ribs were terminated some short distance from the inner rim; the ribs were not set into notches cut in the inner rim. Memory fades but I thought both the SF-10 and SD-10 still used inset ribs back in the 1980s when I was there. Whatever—apparently this piano, at least, was built with non-inset ribs.

Acoustically this is actually a better system through most of the scale. The only problem is on the inside of the treble curve for a very short distance where the grain of the soundboard panel parallels the edge of the inner rim. In some pianos the soundboard panel developed a very slight crack right at the edge of inner rim. This crack was usually fairly short—four to eight inches—and didn’t seem to cause any particular problems other than visual and, since it was buried beneath the frame it was rarely discovered.

If I were replacing the soundboard in one of these pianos I’d cut notches in the inner rim for the top few ribs and inset them. I’d let the lower (bass end) ribs float per the original design. If I were just rebuilding the piano with the original soundboard panel I’d check it carefully and, if I found a problem, I’d repair it. And probably reinforce it with a short strip of fiberglas cloth bedded in epoxy. Other than this I wouldn’t worry about.

These pianos rebuild well. Their problems toward the end—at least as I have seen them—were more cosmetic than structural. I don’t know just when grand piano production moved from Conway to Trumann but it was after this move that things seemed to start falling apart. But from the instruments I’ve seen, at least, there has been nothing wrong that a decent rebuilder couldn’t easily fix. All pianos have their problems and quirks that rebuilders have learned to overcome. These are no exceptions; recapping bridges is straightforward work. So is, for that matter, replacing soundboard panels and cutting rib notches.

The only two design features that are significantly different from other pianos of similar type and size are the vertical hitchpins (which are good things) and the treble section termination pieces (which are a good idea poorly executed). When I rebuilt these pianos I kept both features. I like the vertical hitchpin concept but I didn’t like the original roll pins so I replaced them with solid stainless steel pins similar to those I designed into the two Walter grands.

I also kind of like the idea behind the termination pieces though Ed’s complaints about them being too hard are well founded. They can easily be modified, though, to shorten the duplex string segment and moderately increase the string deflection angle and this solves most of their problems. It’s an easy fix. With hammers like Ronsen/Weikert that are not too wide and are suitably tapered down on the sides to remove excess weight string breakage is simply not a problem.

It wasn’t much of a problem with the original hammers either as long as the factory workers could be restrained from pouring on the lacquer to make the pianos “sing.” (Back in the 1980s there were some in the company who were obsessing over making sure these pianos were always brighter than any Yamaha ever built. That the resulting sound was genuinely ugly was a fact lost on almost everyone.)

These can be great pianos. If after reading all of the various opinions presented here you still want to proceed my only real caution would be that you do so with your eyes wide open. Make sure the price you pay for the piano is appropriate to the work that you know needs to be done as well as the work that may need to be done.

ddf

Hi Ed! I had forgotton about those Baldwin ... capo bar thingies. Now it makes more sense, but I still had never seen or heard of it. Thanks for the info.

Now that I think about it, I only recall the old Baldwins having issues in the capo sections....

Regarding "floating" soundboard splits a more natural woodworking type repair for the problem area Del describes would be to route a 3/8" channel directly above the rib ends of the area of the split all the way to the rim, setting the depth of cut to aprox 1/2 the board thickness and inlaying spruce tenons with the grain direction 90 degrees from the board itself. A type of inserted flush rib so to speak, that will reinforce the weak exposed portion of the board.

Mixing fiberglass cloth and spruce in just one area of the soundboard surface will leave the repair able to come loose due to differential movement between the fiberglass, (which will not move with humidity changes) and the board, (which will).

It would also look like heck and would devalue the piano.

We're talking about a strip fiberglass about 1" wide—it has to be wide enough to bridge the area between the inner rim and the ends of the ribs—and, maybe, 4" to 6" long. It bridges the space between the inner rim and the end of the one rib that terminates in that area. There is all of about 1/2" of fiberglass extending over the free area of the board. With the fibers at 45° to the grain line—I’d hope biaxial cloth would be used—and a decent epoxy this cloth will follow any expansion and contraction that might occur. It is an effective and simple repair and it permanently stops any further cracking.

It does not "look like heck." Done with any kind of finesse it is a completely invisible and permanent repair. I fail to see how it could possibly devalue the piano.

ddf

I've wondered why ribs were inset into the rim for a long time. I just seemed like a simple and natural thing to stop them a bit short in order to create an area with higher compliance. One could almost think of this as the surround used with speakers. The surround does most of the flexing, and the cone is then designed to be stiff to that it might ideally move as a single unit. Care to comment further?



I've looked for the type of vertical hitchpins that your Walter grands use and haven't found them in any of the usual piano-supply catalogs. Are they, in fact, available, or do you have them made?

It is similar, but not quite the same. As you say, you don’t really want a speaker cone to bend or flex at all. It should act like a piston. Piano soundboard assemblies don’t quite act like this; when they are forced into motion by the vibrating strings they do—and should—bend very slightly.

They seem to work best when they bend smoothly across the span of the assembly. Almost, but not quite, like a hinged-edge vibrating panel. The only analogy that comes to mind at the moment—and it’s not a particularly good one—is that of a trampoline panel that has been stiffened in the middle and becomes more flexible as you move away from the middle. It something of a compromise between a clamped-edge vibrating panel and a hinged-edge vibrating panel; it is not a true hinged-edge system but it is also some removed from a clamped edge system. It is a system that works most efficiently when the feathering is made less abrupt and is carried further in toward the middle of the board.

I haven’t done enough direct A-B testing of the two systems to be able to prove categorically that either is acoustically superior although intuitively it would seem that terminating the ribs at a slight distance from the rim—“floating” the ribs—should have a slight edge. (Assuming the ribs are designed correctly.)

Insetting the ribs to the inner rim seems to have been at least in part a protective measure used when animal hide was the only adhesive choice around. The argument is made that animal hide glue is a very strong adhesive and it would not have been necessary to reinforce it in this way. But manufacturers were not always careful in preparing and using the stuff. Temperatures were not always well-controlled and it was used long after it should have been discarded and replaced.

As well, the process of putting a compression-forced crown into a soundboard assembly creates a lot of stress on the glue joint all by itself. Insetting them protects the integrity of the glue joint.

This is a non-issue, of course, with laminated soundboard panels.




Those pins are made by both Driv-Loc (Type G) and Groov-Pin (Type 67). There are probably others but those are the two I’ve used in the past. For my own work I used either Driv-Loc Type H or Groov-Pin Type 24. Both of these are solid pins. They look similar but do not have the annular groove around the top. The strings can be moved up or down on the pin by a millimeter or so; I prefer that they not be more than 5 mm above the plate surface in the bass nor more than 3 mm above the plate in the treble.

ddf

I think the operative assumption about the value of a specific repair to a soundboard is-would a manufacturer do a warranty repair of the nature planned. If it is inconceivable that a manufacturer would execute a specific repair procedure- for a technician to do this for a client puts them in a less than professional light.

Also if the repair is of such unorthodoxy as to be incompatible with the overall engineering of the structure-when the piano goes on the market this will affect the value.

When pianos are of such age as to be largely devalued-different repair protocols can be appropriate.

Well, now the whole tone of your response is even more puzzling.

Baldwin’s typical response to this problem (on the rare occasions that it was discovered in a piano still under warrantee) was for the technician to shove some glue in there from the bottom—to keep it from getting worse—and forget about it. The specific crack under discussion can neither be seen nor accessed from the top unless the plate is removed from the piano. Indeed, it is fairly difficult to see even from the bottom of the piano unless you know specifically where to look and what to look for.

ddf

Hmm, I certainly wouldn't limit myself to the options the factory has. Given the wide range of approaches and failures coming out of factories, to define factory approaches as a standard -- much less the be all and end all of valid technical responses -- is more than a bit limiting in my opinion.

Part of our responsibilities as technicians is as a fiduciary. We protect the value of our clients pianos. We must be knowledgable of how value is determined in the piano market to do this.

A piano soundboard of a 5 to 40 year old artist quality grand repaired with fiberglass cloth epoxied to the surface over a crack would be a material fault that any buyer would want to be aware of. Competing sellers would use information like that to create uncertainty in the mind of any prospective purchaser of a piano like that. Anything that creates doubt reduces marketability. Those are the hard facts of business.

An SF-10 piano aspires to fit in the market as artist quality. I think any particular repair must be planned to take that into account. Others can have their opinion-I have stated mine. Good luck to you all!

I agree with you about the fiduciary part. And I agree that the SF-10 aspires to be an artist-quality piano. But I disagree with most everything else.

Given what I know about the specific problem being discussed—one that is probably not even an issue in SF-10 or SD-10 models—the repair I described is the better repair. You can denigrate the use of relatively modern materials (or me, for that) all you want but that doesn’t change reality and it ignores the fact that epoxy and fiberglass reinforcements have been successfully used with wood assemblies and structures more than 70 years.

The material and method I described permanently solves all of the issues related to the specific problem that occasionally shows up for a specific reason in a specific area of the soundboard in specific pianos: namely the Model M, Model R and Model L; i.e., those models using “floating” ribs that terminate at specific spots on the inside curve of the rim. (Unless it’s confirmed by the technician actually looking at the piano I don’t believe this was ever an issue with the SF-10.)

I believe the best repair is the one designed to solve all aspects of a given problem; in this case one caused by a localized design defect. It should be unobtrusive, effective and permanent. It should use the best and most appropriate materials available. And it should not add to the original problem. It should not be arbitrarily limited to traditional materials especially if there is reason to believe that using traditional materials results in a repair that will not perform as well. The process I have suggested meets these criteria and I’m not at all convinced that the repair you have suggested will perform as well. The method you’ve suggested does use wood but wood, while “traditional,” is not always the best choice.

ddf