Fort Worth Piano Tuning
Concert tuning. Living room price.
Working With The Hammers
This is the first of a few articles i want to put out on specific adjustments and techniques we use to repair different parts of your instrument. I hope by educating a little bit about the function or all the parts of the piano we can better understand why our pianos go out of tune or begining to stop sounding and working the way that we want them to.
Other than the strings themselves, hammers tend to be the number one reason our pianos begin to sound off or get thrown out of tune. This is because the material the hammers are made of is felt, and while the felt is designed to take a beating it needs to be soft for sound of the strike to be softened. Because of this the hammers ends can get warped and groove lines where the hammer strikes can occur. If you want to take a quick look to check the health of your hammers you can do so fairly easily. What you want to look for is a soft roundness on the end with no grooves and no discoloration form one to the next. If you notice deep grooves in your hammers that is an indicator that they need to be changed or at the very least filed down and made round again. |
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One of the easiest way to fix old hammers is by filing them down. Like most things that you want to soften, your piano technician is going to use a series of differing grits of sandpaper to slowly bring the felt to a desired roundness and clear away the grooves that have developed over time.
Once the technician is satisfied with the filing, it is time to mate the hammer to the string. This is a very important step, and not one you would be able to do on your own unless your were a practices tuning and regulating piano technician. “Mating the Hammer” as it is often called is the process by which you double check that when the hammer strikes, it hits all three strings it is associated with at the same time. You see, often in the higher notes of the piano you will have three strings associated with one note. These strings need to be tuned in sync with one another. Which is a huge task in an of itself! Which we will cover in a later article. But moreover the hammer that strikes them needs to hit all three at the same time, otherwise it will create an ugly thud sound and sound muted and off. This is where the professional experience comes into play. This part can take time but is essential finishing the job of hammer work.
Once the technician is satisfied with the filing, it is time to mate the hammer to the string. This is a very important step, and not one you would be able to do on your own unless your were a practices tuning and regulating piano technician. “Mating the Hammer” as it is often called is the process by which you double check that when the hammer strikes, it hits all three strings it is associated with at the same time. You see, often in the higher notes of the piano you will have three strings associated with one note. These strings need to be tuned in sync with one another. Which is a huge task in an of itself! Which we will cover in a later article. But moreover the hammer that strikes them needs to hit all three at the same time, otherwise it will create an ugly thud sound and sound muted and off. This is where the professional experience comes into play. This part can take time but is essential finishing the job of hammer work.
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