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And here we are discussing hi end levers. There are many parts of the world with varying economies, covered by this international forum where designer tools are, for one reason or another, simply not an option. .

While there are cheap tools sold everywhere, most are cheap metal that will be damaged before the pins will. Some are homemade and overbuilt and they can damage the pins. Pins can be damaged by a perfectly good tool being misused. I saw this in the states in the seventies when a guild person was advocating a form of speed tuning where the lever never quite seated properly on the pins.

Because of what I do, I only carry a #2 tip tool in my pocket. About every 2-3 years I tune a special piano (for achieving an old but good piano sound) in one of the studios with oversize pins. My #2 tip reaches approx half way down the pin. I tune it that way without risk of damage but I have to think about everything I do. I can't work as intuitively as I normally to. Who ever said that thinking about what we are doing was a bad thing?

A tool that goes onto the pin halfway down or more won't do any damage. It is certainly not necessary to reach the coil. Too tight a fit will make it difficult to easily remove the tool from the pin while a lot of rocking can easily be overcome and often not even noticed by good tuning technique as I'm sure we have all experienced. The desire to bend or flagpole the pin being easily satisfied by choosing the angle of the handle of the lever to the string appropriately. (pushing the lever toward the string indiscriminately from an extreme of the three o'clock position will give more than enough flagpoling).

There are pianos where a certain amount of flex in the lever is desirable. I remember turning up for work the first day at a major manufacturer outlet and being told the I could "throw that away for a start" by the head concert tech talking about my heavy extension lever. He used a set of three 2" head goosenecks, each with a different size tip. He was recognised as an exptionally solid tuner.

In the final analysis, it's the skill of the tuner that is all important.

And let's be at least aware of any tool snobbery creeping in here.

Last year Dan Levitan's Classic came out as a good choice in a couple of threads. All members of this forum can buy one at trade price.

I was on the point of getting one when a kind lady gave me a mint 50 year old T-lever.

Sentence #1 - YESSSSSS! A tool won't 'larn-ya' how to tune.

Setence #2 - When I pull my beautiful Faulk hammer out of my case, I resist the impulse to do the downward flourish that the hotties on "Price is Right" use to draw attention to the show merchandise, and just go humbly about my work. That, I think, might absolve me of any snobbery. (I hope)

Sentence #1 glad you agree.

Sentence#2.. That's personal pride. Not snobbery.

Me? I tend to give my Fujan a little baton twirl before I start...

Darn! 'A tool snob showoff right here on Piano World. I'm shocked I tellya. 'Shocked!

At least I'm in acknowledgement...

Yea, I'm probably in ... uh, ... unacknowledgement.

Nah. I'm sure your customers are entertained by that little happy dance you do every time you open your tool bag...

Thanks to all for your comments and advice.

I decided to go with Tom Driscoll's solution. At $195 with shipping, it wasn't inexpensive, but it wasn't nearly as expensive as the Fujan. I don't tune pianos 5 or 6 days a week, so I just couldn't justify the extra expense.

I like the Driscoll tool a lot. Now the pins move for me, instead of the tool flexing and then the pins. My control is better with it, and my tunings are more stable.

It has a different feel from the Fujan, which though larger, feels paradoxically lighter, and perhaps a bit stiffer yet. The polished ball is the right size for my hand; I like the rubberized coating on the handle that both cushions and secures my grip.

In any case, I'm glad Mr. Driscoll is crafting his version, and I'm looking forward to it working for me for years.

Have you tested your stability?

Mark - I'm pretty stable, as far as pianists go...

Regarding testing the stability of my tuning: I don't have any formal test. What I do have, at least in the case of my own piano, is how it sounds the day after a tuning. Listening carefully as I go through my daily exercises prior to getting into repertoire work, I have a chance, wanted or not, to listen to how well the piano stays in tune. It absolutely is more so now with my use of the carbon fiber lever.

yup seeker... stability-wise, being the pianist you tune for, you have the advantage of getting brutally honest feedback, in real-time, daily. Lots of techs don't get the benefit of that real-time feedback.

LOL!

It's quite simple. Tune a string, measure it, hit it three times fff, measure it again. Try for less than 0.9 cents drift.

To really test your ability, choose the strings that have the tightest/loosest feel, if you can. Also, the longest/shortest non-speaking length (between the pin and the upper termination point, i.e. v-bar or agraffe)

The most difficult strings to tune:
Tight pins/short NSL
Loose pins/long NSL

The secret is, what do we do when you find strings that drift more than 0.9 cents?

We PANIC!

Mark,

Whatever happened to your soft blow, easy on the bod' and ears, gentle flexing of the pin technique???

Most pianists I know, including myself refuse to mash the key abusively and non-musically in testing a string. One can mostly tell when a string is going to move without banging on the poor thing. Read the strings response to gentle pin flex.

Some strings in Seeker's case, will move over time. Mostly those strings will be the same strings each time he tunes. So he gets to look out for which strings will tend to move. This gives him the advantage of then analyzing what about those front segments is different/difficult to read, and work the NSL question.

Seeing a piano every day, and being a pianist with "ears" as he is, with the right attention to which strings move over a couple of hours, gives a huge amount of useful feedback.

While this is true, and Kees' analysis is true, there's significant information left out in basic free body diagram analysis which disconnects these facts from the reality of experience.

First, the shearing force at the pin in the Levitan Professional lever, when used properly as Dan instructs, is the same force as pressing with your hand on the pin itself, as if you were reaching through the block while tuning.

To get more specific, it is equivalent (with perfect pin-to-tip contact) to the exact force exerted on the end of the lever, at a position on the pin body dictated by the point of force application on the downtube. With a higher grip, this could be at the surface of the block, and with a lower grip, below the surface of the block.

Does anyone think this shearing force is seriously causing any pinblock damage? It is so negligible in context, it could be assumed to be zero. Can you damage a laminated maple pinblock by pressing on it with your hand?

Given, that force is concentrated into a smaller area on the side of a steel pin, but that resultant pressure is still very small. Compared to bending force, where compression is mostly concentrated at the top layer of the block and magnified by a lever arm, side shear force (acting along nearly 1/2 of the surface area of the pin) is negligable.

Second, the bending force at the pin can be calculated to be actually zero under the right use conditions. This is a tremendous innovation in design for the tuning lever, deceptive in how complex the force balancing actually is.

In a conventional lever system, with a horizonal and vertical component acting over the block, I think it as most accurate to simulate both components as torques (there are many ways to simulate forces). A single acting force turns out to create rotation in both planes (bending and twisting component), with an acting total torque parallel to the effective lever arm of the system. In other words, the total torque (or force vector) acts at the angle defined between the base of the pin and the top of the lever handle (assuming perfect pin-to-tip contact).

The string coil moves this point only slightly upward because of its reinforcement effect, but relative give compared to the block. We also add an additional torsional component when using a standard lever, because of the way the hand grips a lever handle from the top. This only adds to the bending component of a traditional lever.

If you could see deformation in the pin from a traditional lever using compression sensors, the colors on the pin for compression would be highest in a region shifted slightly to the left of the base facing the tuner, with the lever in a standard 3:00 position.

The forces of pin bending are substantial in a typical setup. It was only after using the Levitan lever that I realized just how much stress was produced solely from trying to equalize the NSL of the string to correct for this huge (and largely unpredictable) error in tuning. Large amounts of time and technique had been spent to develop a feeling in my body to predict and feel these deformations to correct for them and achieve stability.. and ONLY due to this bending component!

A good way to visualize what is happening inside the Levitan lever is a zero-sum force condition in the static position. Even though effective lever arms are useful in achieving accurate numbers for the endpoints, they can't help us see what is happening along the pathway. To do this, we have to look at a series of force conditions, or measurements along the pathway, which is more accurate to the real world.

The Levitan lever works on a system of counter-balancing torques. In the standard position with the lever maintube directly perpendicular to the stretcher, there's many different places we could apply a force on the downtube. Imagine first, that you applied a force to the top of the downtube, as in a standard lever. What would happen?

Well, the Levitan lever would work just like a standard lever in this case, with a total torque component acting at the angle I described above. There would be bending at the pin towards the 9:00 position, reacting equal and opposite to the applied torque (F*H).

Now imagine that you moved slightly downwards, what is happening there?

Well, you have now introduced a torsional component to the maintube, acting in the reverse direction as the torsional component from the force applied above the block. From the point of view of the pin, there is still the same vertical lever height above it, applying a torsion to it. The acting force is the same, but this time it appears to the pin as a slightly lower acting force.

Now imagine that you move down further, what happens?

As you descend the downtube, applying the same force, you are adding a greater and greater torsional component in the maintube, opposite of the direction of the applied force (which is also seen as a torsion by the pin in the acting lever arm above it). You are still applying the same force to the top of the lever arm above the pin, it is just being negated by a counter-torsion!

At a certain point, this counter-torsion equals the torsion produced by the applied force in the lever arm over the pin, until the only force acting is a shear, or side force on the pin itself. This point of shear force is extended further down the pin into the block (given perfect pin-to-tip contact) by increasing the length of the downtube, which is exactly why Levitan designed it this way.

In the end, you have a pure horizonal torsional component acting (rotation in the plane of the block) and only a side force on the pin equivalent to the sideways pressure your hand exerts on the lever! Additionally, this force is in the 9:00 direction and has no effect on the string!

I'm sure Ryan has more than enough good info to get a good lever already, but this is something that I felt should be added in defense of Levitan's design.

Let me say I completely agree with RXD, that sufficient skill developed to a level, negates the necessity to use any kind of special lever. The only fallout is the extra time and strain it may cause to negotiate the bending component.

Negotiating all this NSL stuff becomes completely null and void with the use of the Levitan lever. Why? The lever separates these force components completely, so you can choose when to use either, instead of getting a swath of information from mixed forces.

When you pull strings to tension with the lever, all lengths will be at the correct equilibrium point needed for the string to stay stable.

The only exception to this is when bearing points are very high in friction, due to angle, shape or condition. In this case, the tendency may be for the NSL to be higher in tension than is needed to stabilize the speaking length. This is just about the only exception, besides string grooves or anomalies, where you may have to use judicious pin bending to help relax that length for stability.

Although I have not done any tests, I agree that shearing force has a negligible effect on NSL and pin block.

The answer to my question is: NSL analysis.

Example:
String goes flat.

Ask, "What was my last motion, sharpening or flattening?"
Ask, "What was the hammer angle?"
Ask, "Was I using a slow pull or impact/impulse technique?"

If slow pull, the string went flat because when you removed the force from the tuning lever, it left the NSL tension below the dynamic tension band.

Analyze what you can do differently so that the After Tuning (unbending/untwisting) leaves the NSL tension higher.

If you are using impact/impulse, you must move the foot a tiny bit clockwise and then massage until the desired pitch.

Thank you for this explanation Tunewerk!

I do find it frustrating when the analyses presented by engineers ( of whatever discipline), approach the analysis with a set of seriously incomplete assumptions of the total forces acting in a system...The intimation is, that if what one is feeling when using the lever differs from the conclusions of incomplete analyses, then what one is feeling must be foo-foo.

After learning to use the lever, and learn when a little flex is called for,or not called for, relative to a trad lever, the extraneous "noise" that has to be decoded in the NSL,is reduced by an order of magnitude.

There are analytical learners and holistic learners. Analytical methods are aggrivating to holistic learners and holistic methods are aggravating to analytical learners.

Virgil Smith is my idol but reading his books drives me crazy; no analytical explanations.

The benefit of the analytical approach is that when the holistic approach fails, as it will at times, you can figure out what to do if you have a good model.

The other benefit is that understanding the physics of the system, and applying it in practice, allows the execution to become second nature faster.

You even used an analytical description when referring to when the C lever fails. Btw the effect of friction is much less variable than we think. With consistent materials, angles, and tensions, there is no frictional variation. It is NSL length that produces the same effect as if there were different friction. That threw me off for years

My analysis is not a method, it is the truth about forces, friction, and elastic deformation in the string/pin system. I used some terms that may have frustrated you but the topic is huge. I have submitted an article to the PTG journal and it is over 3000 words and still doesn't explain everything. But the topic is too important IMHO to approach it from a "just do what feels right" approach. We need to have good stabilty on all pianos at all times.

The c lever does not eliminate the truth of NSL analysis. The three F's are still there; Forces, Friction, and elastic deFormation. Dan is bending continually in his video.

I appreciate your post but your attack on the analytical method may serve to discourage ofhers from researching this subject more deeply. It is not as simple as you imply.