Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Is this a bridge crack?

Sounds all to close to the problems outlined by Sally Phillips regarding Baldwin's problems in the 1980's. Grain orientation is pretty important...

Not a new phenomenon. Knabe had incorrect grain orientation on bridge cps down to an art form for decades.

Hah, ouch!

I'm curious about the timeframe on that - did this happen when they were made in Baltimore, or in Rochester (Aeolian years)?

Wrong grain orientation long before Rochester, as did many Chickerings and some Baldwins. The pre-Rochester Chickerings also had laminated flat-sawn pin-blocks. Comparing aging performance to Steinway and Mason-Hamlin is how we "learned" quarter-sawn maple is better.

I should add this point to my earlier post about having to repair a couple of new Steinway bridges. It was failure at one or two notes on the bridge, not a whole section like the OT.

I'm with Steve on this one: selling something defective and/or repaired as "new" is unethical. "Scratch and dent," "refurbished," "second quality," "blemished," etc, but not "new," even if it comes with a warranty.

Given Pneuma's ongoing experience, this dealer sounds like a real bad apple.

No. I have had factory experience for many years, not with pianos, and it is normal to have at the back end of quality control repairs done before final shipment. The repairs may be done in the factory, or they can be contracted externally. Either way, the product is finally shipped as "new".

I once bought a nice Kawai grand that had a similar crack in the top two notes like the picture shows. It took about a half hour to fix with epoxy. The piano stays in tune fine, and those last two notes sound about as good on it as most pianos.

I don't see it as that big a deal if the rest of the bridge looks good. If the piano plays and sounds nice, a crack like this should not be a deal breaker. It actually could be a way to get an extremely good deal on the piano!

Believe me this is a better situation than a run of baby grands that a famous manufacturer put out a number of years ago. These particular small grands had the upper end of the treble bridge in the wrong position, making the string length too long. The result was the top two notes were untunable. They would break no matter how carefully one brought the strings up to pitch. I spoke to the manufacturer about it, and I was told it was a known problem and the solution was to "just tune it flat".

I was a little shocked but didn't want to make a stink so I did just that. It sits in a choir room in a large high school. The regular tuner continues to not even bother to tune those two top notes, and he said there's never been a complaint about it.

Anyways, sometimes we make mountains out of mole hills.

Perhaps, but herein lies the problem...

Based on my interpretation of the OP, the dealer in question was NOT offering the piano at a discount due to the defect; nor was the dealer acknowledging the defect as a problem to much of any degree.

I'm tight with my money, because I don't have much of it, and what little I do have was hard-earned. I'm all for checking out a scratch-and-dent-sale at a piano store. But a cracked bridge, regardless of the extent, is way worse than a scratched finish or a ding on the fall board.

When a piano dealer or manufacturer begins to accept a lower standard of quality or excellence, it's a dangerous president that spiral's out of control and only hurts dealer's reputation as well as the consumer.

Just my .02, after my first cup of morning coffee... (I may see things differently after the second )

Rick

+1

"...Because it is unethical and most courts have held that failure to disclose a material fact is grounds for breach of the sales contract. This is especially true in small claims court...."

There is a certain music to this statement... though it seems more operatic than pianistic. Act I, scene iii Oh yes, I could picture it on stage.

In performance on the smaller stage of a Small Claims court, even though the audience is harder to win over than an opera house crowd (with its higher proportion of piano owners), the case is helped by the fact that it lacks subtlety. It's a big old crack, which would jump off the screen, a visual homonym to the lawyers' intonation, "Unethical...failure to disclose a material fact...breach of the sales contract." Except that lawyers are not allowed in Small Claims proceedings, so the plaintiffs will have to practice intoning these phrases on their own.

But they are good phrases to repeat, and to illustrate with photos (and sales documents, correspondence, logs detailing phone conversations answered and unanswered, and many other things), because they are words which excite an involuntary reflex in judges. You can make this even more effective if you have a pointer to indicate things on-screen, and emphasize each phrase with a good whack. I count four whacks just in the phrase, "failure to disclose a material fact," as long as you don't rush it. Whacks keep a judge awake, and if you do it right, after awhile they'll give a little jump even without a whack.

It takes a great deal of work and perseverance to prevail in such an action, and the winning litigant must collect the judgement on their own. And the whole thing can drag on for quite awhile. Still, the moment of sweet victory has its satisfactions. And, the memory of the experience is enough to make a piano shopper MUCH more vigilant in the future. That may be its main value, because an ounce of due diligence is worth a pound of damaging testimony. What, you thought the scales of justice were just a metaphor? Oh, no.

Well, good luck.

Oh--- I see you settled. Maybe it's just as well, for your mental and emotional health.

Bravo!

I'm gonna enjoy a refreshing beverage during intermission, while waiting for the next act!

Lawyers ARE permitted in small claims court in Maryland, and I believe in many other jurisdictions.

However, representing one's self is often a better approach as most small claims courts are more interested in the facts that in lawyerly rhetoric.

i find that the threat of negative reviews is also a powerful tool of persuasion.