Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum To Splice or Not to Splice?

Bill, I have the highest respect for you and your skills, to the point that I now tune grands the way you do (hammer technique). I know I disagree with you on this and am pretty adamant about it, but don't think for a minute that it diminishes my admiration of your skills and contributions to the trade!

Loren,

Thanks, I know you meant no disrespect and I do respect the way we can have different points of view on a subject and not resort to mockery and ridicule to "win" the argument.

As Ryan said on the subject of pitch, it would be nice if...
If I had my druthers and I could make everything perfect, every time, I would.

Jer,

I will copy and paste your instructions and put them in a file so I can refer to them if I have a notion to post a pic again. I see you guys do it all the time on the Northland thread, so it must not be that difficult once you get the hang of it.

I tuned one already today, voted in the primary election and had an early lunch. I have two more in town, then 3 at a church 40 miles away if I have the energy to do all of them, otherwise, I'll have to go back and finish the two verticals some other time but my schedule is so full and I have trips planned, so, I guess I gotta do what I gotta do when I gotta do it and that includes splicing a string when that is necessary.

Bill,

Now you know how I feel about figuring out EBVT III!!!

I replaced two bass strings on a U1 today. Splicing was not an option, one string of a bichord was missing. There was not a big difference in the sound of the new strings compared to the adjacent strings.

How old can a U1 be? Probably not old enough to have really dead or bad sounding wound strings yet. If it was an old (50 or older) piano the difference in tone might be quite pronounced.

I hate it when the customer or the previous "Tooner" throws out or misplaces the original string.

Well, I have tuned a U3 from the early 1950s, but this one was from about 1980.

What you say would seem to indicate that replacement is better than splicing for pianos less than about 50 years old. After that, the piano likely needs restringing anyway, so splicing is a temporary expedient.

I tune many, many, MANY hundred-year-old uprights with original strings all intact, at pitch, sound fine. a 50 year old piano today was built in 1961.

1961? Gee, I remember that like it was yesterday. I still think 1999 was last year, lol.

It was new the year I started working on pianos. Was it really necessary to remind me...

ddf

HA! Sorry about that, Del! :p

Oh, I don't really know that age would be as big a deciding factor to me as would condition. And of course, what is in the best interest of the customer.

Now today I had an interesting repair on a teflon vintage S&S "B". The piano started off life in a very humid climate (Somewhere in NY) and the whole piano was lightly corroded, though the bass strings sounded pretty good for a stock set from the 70's.

This piano had a broken agraffe at note 19.

The customer was concerned about the appearance of new strings and asked if the old strings could be re-used. I agreed to try but the beckets did not survive the procedure (Not a procedure I recommend for hemophiliacs) so I gave her the option of splicing both wires and she was happy with that. She just didn't want two shiny new strings upsetting her sensibilities.

So, being the customer oriented guy that I am, I proceeded with a double splice with a new agraffe.

Very successful repair. Nice tight knots right next to the tuning pins. Good coils, very stable, clean repair. Took a total of 15 minutes.

Anyone want to guess what her complaint was when the repair was finished?

That the new agraffe did not match the old ones.

The blood on her white carpet?

I had to replace the oven in my kitchen once, which was built in to an ash cabinet. A friend made a new frame face for the cabinet out of new ash, which is quite white. A friend of my wife's, a carpenter, saw it and said most of his customers would not stand for that. Today, the frame matches the rest of the cabinets pretty well. Had it been stained, it probably would no longer match.

Yep!

You might point out that there is a solution: restring the whole piano. That way she gets all shiny new strings, all shiny new agraffes and shiny new tuning pins (which, unlike the originals, will all be at the same height).

ddf

But Del, then her piano wouldn't be original. BTW, I swear it's the truth, she laid out towels over the tuning pins for me to put my tools on, and when I finished she got out a magnifying lens to make sure I hadn't damaged anything during the repair. I was almost shocked that she hadn't put down a sheet for my tool cases.

By an eerie piece of luck, the new shiny agraffe string height matched the height in the field pretty well. Not sure how that happened. Klinke made a mistake, maybe?

Sounds like a stressful client! Maybe its one of those times you leave your competitors business card!

So, where is that Mezzo-Thermal Stabilizer (i.e., pre-ager) when you need it?

ddf

Have her cat pee on it? That seems to make new brass parts look old in a hurry!