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Has anyone ever heard of or heard an experimental piano that used hammers that were NOT made of felt? There are some old patents for polyurethane hammers that would basically last forever. Has anyone ever encountered such an oddity?

Clark

My piano has hammers of rubber and (synthetic) buckskin...

An acoustic piano?

Does acousto-electric count? It gives it a bell like sound or... Like throwing a rubber ball at a harp.

I'd be interested to know the choice in using the rubber and buckskin, because I believe the Kawai and Helpinstills use felt hammers and sound more like a proper acoustic.

Helpinstills definitely have felt hammers. They also have soundboards.

While I was R&D Director at Baldwin I did make a set of polyurethane hammers for a Hamilton upright. They did not last forever, however. They started splitting with far fewer blows than we expect from felt hammers.

ddf

I'll bet that with a few hundred million years of trial-and-error you could find something that would be acceptable for piano hammers. That's how sheep figured it out.

Yeah, I was talking with my neighbor who is an engineer. (and has some nice equipment he lets me use -- like an end mill for boring hammers!). Anyway, we were talking pianos and he was suggesting that there would be a more "modern" substitute for wool. He had never looked at a photomicrograph of the structure of wool to realize that so far no artificial fiber has come close to what wool can do.

On another wildly different category, I am a wilderness backpacker and there is no synthetic fabric that is as good as wool at moisture management for clothing.

I don't know that there's any real reason to seriously look for a replacement, really. Sure, the wool needs some upkeep and occasionally replacing on a heavily used piano or one used by a serious musician but I think the fact that so many 100 year old pianos still have origional hammers on them and that they will make any noise at all instead of instantly disintegrating on contact with the strings shows how appropriate wool is for the job.

"On another wildly different category, I am a wilderness backpacker and there is no synthetic fabric that is as good as wool at moisture management for clothing."

They keep looking for something that will do a better job, for the weight and packability, of thermal insulation than the feather. Even mighty Dupont has come up short.

The pianist may not understand this, but the backcountry camper will get it right away.

I agree with Little Blue. Felt hammers work very well, are made of a self-sustaining material, and relatively inexpensive.

Maybe we could find something toxic and non-renewable to use instead?

Vinyl Colored by cadmium and lead paints, of course. Neon stains on the strings!

I am highly doubtful that another material will be found for hammers that sounds anywhere near as good.
I can tell you that I would welcome a material that held a high level voicing longer though. Perfect voicing used in high level recording and concert work sometimes doesnt even survive one piece of music.

Hammers are packed fibers which are not woven. There are so many other fibers out there; one might think something else could be found which would be superior in at least one of the two ways in which felt causes complaints: holding voicing longer, and wearing longer.

Kevlar could be spun into tiny fibers like felt. Maybe someone could try to make a kevlar felt and press it into a set of hammers.

If the hardness of the material is more than steel, I guess the strings themselves will wear out. (It's like putting sandpaper on the hammers). I don't know what the hardness of Kevlar is like. The ideal material would probably be just slightly softer than steel.

Excellent!

Because hammer moldings need to be kept warm at all costs for good piano performance.

Or because sheep have been banging up against steel wires for hundreds of millions of years?

This patent uses Pellon "voicing tape" on the outside felt to improve its durability (and alter its tone). I wonder if he is marketing it yet.