Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Dan Levitan's Lever

It's not difficult to buy - you just have to join the secret society and learn the secret handshake!

I can get it for you wholesale...

And sell it to you retail!

No problem with flagpole I just thought the tool provide less than waht I see there; Before flagpoling the twisting of the pin is more constructive, and compress less the block.

The cracks Ok come from the pinblock, but with his lever you have little choice of torque/pressure orientation, while with a standard lever the handle can change orientation depending of the block, the technique used...

The unisons are clean, they just may be a little asleep, to me.

Applied force to the flagpole handle a little less. Hand tuner will be less tired, but to catch the sound for his own ear by pulling this lever is a little harder. But to have an experienced professional to work need such a lever which to the extent possible would to save from destruction a pinblock

a tuner usually does not need to play an interval to find which string is low/high, suffice to play the doublets (and it is quieter for the ear)

I really cannot imagine how you can perceive the pin's rotational plane with such a lever. probably you can, but with less tactile feedback, as with the ball lever when you have it in the palm of the hand, the twisting and bending of the pin is less perceived
( because the wrist is at 90° from the same plane then the ankle have to assess the rotational plane it is less clear).

I believe that a handle with a 90° return on the end of the lever would give more feedback.

I wonder whether one could get a first-cut feeling for this type of hammer by adding a grip handle (something like the removable front handle on an electrical hand drill, or a long steering knob) to the end of a conventional extension lever.

Ok, so this lever eliminates flagpoling, but it does not deal with string rendering or pin torque. I purposely use flagpoling to deal with these other two factors.

Hmmm... I just now thought of it. You still can flagpole the pins if you choose to. Just add some upward or downward force. Hmmm...

I disagree with your views on flag poling from several perspectives beethoven. First of all its only a valid techniique as a last resort...it should never be simply used without trying to manipulate the pin in the way it was designed to be moved....rotationally.

Secondly, pianos can be tuned using horrific techniques that puts unneccesary wear and tear on them. The end results don't simply justify any means to get there. Plenty of youtube DIYers demonstrating this all the time.

If I seen a tuner deliberately move to a pin, throw the hammer in 12 oclock position and begin flagpoling and bumping/nudging the pin back and forth in line with the string...without first trying to move it rotationally, I would kick their butt out the door.

If the pin is cracking to either side of target and does not want to settle in place, this is a valid reason to pursue less conventional techniques. The block is not as elastic as you think. If wood had the resiliant qualities of being completely elastic and immune to deformation, the pins would not be drilled at an angle to begin with.

Also, not everyone puts the same amount of force (in flagpoling direction) on the pin when tuning. A 3 oclock position of the hammer will put more force in this direction from rotational manipulation than a 12, or 1 oclock position.
One can also apply a countering force to lessen the effects of pin tilt by by rotating the lever handle like a motorcycle throttle grip, while pulling it in the pins rotation axis. I use this technique all the time to help keep the tilting forces on the pin more neutral.

Well, of course.... but if I'm in a situation where the pitch is going to move a lot before the pin even moves in the block, and I only need to change the pitch a few cents, you better believe I'm going to use intentional tilting of the pin.




Likewise, if I saw a tuner try to tune my piano by raising the pitch of a string 50 cents just so he had the pleasure of feeling the pin move in the block, his butt would be out the door.



Less conventional?




From what I've read, this angle is actually a holdover from the fortepiano era; essentially, it is done due to tradition rather than necessity, cause our pins don't start dislodging themselves from the pin block like they used to With our infinity-ply granite pin blocks, where tilting is most often necessary, there's simply no need to worry.



I don't ascribe to any particular "time".... sometimes, it's 12, or 2, or 3, or 6. Whatever is comfortable and effective for the situation at hand.

There is no way to not flagpole the pin as long as you are using any lever with a handle that you push or pull on. The only thing you can do is flagpole in a direction that lessens the impact of pitch, i.e., side to side instead of in line with the string.

It seems to me that the only way to completely eliminate flagpoling on a grand would be to use the grand Cyberhammer, since with it you are applying pure torque.

I watched a renown tech use a rotational bumping motion to set a pin which was cracking, when several other techs before him (including myself) tried and said it couldn't be easily done. Sometimes wiggling the handle around while pulling will set the crack of the pin off from a different place. Also slightly deformed or oblong pin holes put most of the static friction on the string sideof the upper part of the pin. I will sometimes use my other hand to tune and have the handle at 11 oclock where the tilt is less severe (being opposite the string tension). This reduces the friction on the tilted pin enough to minimize the cracking in many cases.

An impact wrench that has the same shape of a traditional lever, L shaped with the handle above the pin, does everything a normal lever does as far as force vectors...and this includes the vector of tilt force on the pin. It simply does it on a higher order of speed affording smaller movements of the pin because you are overcoming static friction more efficiently than slow application of force. Force vectors don't change values in relation to each other unless its applied to a different location on a part, or from a different angular direction. Both levers get the force applied from the handle in identical ways therefore the amount of tilt force stays equal in relation to rotational force.

Srry, dbble post
(edited)

Emmery, I'm referring to the grand version of the Cyberhammer, which has two equally weighted arms protruding away from each other, with the head in the middle. You spin it instead of pull or push. Pure torque.

I have great respect for Dan Levitan and think he's one of the best technicians out there, technically as well as artistically, but I am confused about the claims of this lever.

It seems that there is an equivocation being made to the effective lever arm being in the plane of rotation, and the elimination of bending force (flagpoling) in reality.

Effective leverage arms are used in action design to state how a whole assembly will behave. These are mostly theoretical, however, because they don't delineate force transfer through an actual structure. They only summarize a structure in terms of it's effective lever arm lengths; also the start and stop angles of rotation.

In Dan Levitan's design, force applied to the handle near the keys will translate to a bending force in the handle rod, against the normal force exerted by the pin. This will be translated to a torsional force around the main rod and back to a bending force in the pin rod. This will 'flagpole' the pin like any other lever.

The only constraint may be the stiffness of the lever, made of .035" stainless. This will reduce torsional and bending loads from at least increasing the stress angle.

I was present at one meeting discussing the design of his lever. He focused on components of force, saying that any force applied above the plane of rotation of the pin results in two components: one in the plane of the pin, and one orthogonal to the plane, a component determined by the sine or cosine of the angle and the length of the lever arm.

This is true, as basic physics. As you increase the angle of application of force, you introduce an increasing component of bending force, described by the sine of applied force, or F*sin[a]. But to physically accomplish the theoretical rotation along the plane, you'd need a lever going through the pinblock.

Even though the effective leverage arm goes through the pinblock in Levitan's design, and the theoretical angle is zero, the real angles or force transfer are not zero.

I'm going to guess that this lever feels good because of the stiffness of the material it is made out of, the welded joints, and the fact that all pin deflection is forced to occur at 90 deg. to the speaking length.

I would be happy to see the measured results of a controlled experiment with varying the position of the force applied to the lever's handle both above and below the horizontal plane of the pin (pinblock), and varying the length of the lever. The measurement would be of rotational force at the pin but in the vertical plane (flagpoling).

I am also suspicious that the Levitan C lever may not work precisely as it's been described. But I've rationalized how I think the practical forces work. (I have not used one, so I am clearly blowing out my arse on this, but that won't stop me...)

Let's say you have a relatively loose fitting tip on on your lever, say a Watanabe 2 or 3. It's not a nice, tight fit, so the points of contact with the pin are roughly at the top of the pin, and lower on the pin near the coil. You lean on a regular lever, and flagpoling ensues with the fulcrum roughly at the bottom of the tip, while the lever arm is supported by the contact at the top of the pin.

Now imagine a C lever like the Levitan design, but the handle is longer. Grab this imaginary lever at the bottom of the handle, to clarify the force vectors. Then the fulcrum is still near the coil end of the tip, and is effectively fixed in place. But because of where you've grabbed the handle, since the rotational plane is way below the level of the pin, the behavior at the top of the pin like an uneven teeter-totter, and the top contact point on the pin is actually pushing the opposite way you are pushing the handle of the lever. So the pin does not flagpole in the direction it does with a normal lever, and some amount of force is actually pushing it the other way, because of that orthogonal force vector. I think that's the way this imaginary C lever would work, reverse flagpoling. Then I imagine that the actual length of the handle in the real Levitan design is made short enough so that the opposing force I just described is close to zero.

I was not at Dan's presentation, so I don't know what was said there, but from the descriptions I've seen in the videos, and diagrams in articles, I'm not sold on the idea that manipulating the pin above the plane of the pinblock can actually cause the pin to rotate as if an imaginary lever is grabbing it in the center of the pinblock and turning it, which seems to be implied. It seems to me, at best, you are doing some cancelling of the ordinary flagpoling force, perhaps in a similar fashion to the Reyburn grand impact lever (which Loren conveniently linked to above). But I'd say that alone is an accomplishment.

I wonder if you could hang that lever off the right side of a grand. Then you could get a better feel for whether any flagpoling was going on. As it is, the default position is parallel to the strings, conveniently, where flagpoling has less effect anyway even with a normal lever.

I'm not sure it matters much to me though, I like my Fujan, and being able to position it either parallel or perpendicular as I see fit; the string rendering while (lightly) flagpoling is good information too.

Kamin



I think he just wants to emphasize how easy his tool works. Working hard on the attacks might not fit that.

possible indeed , well seen ...

This works on the assumtion that the wave of the impulsion is raising all wire segments the same.

Then the tuner have no control on that front segment (which is indeed the less easy part of the wire to control as stated a colleague on a French forum lately)

A good way to break bass strings in my opinion , as nudging with them.

Then again on the video a demonstration of non tuning.

Gosh, guys. Haven't you ever used a box end wrench on a rusty bolt and flipped the wrench around so the plane of force was the same as the plane of resistance? The wrench is less likely to slip from the bolt. Dan's lever works just like he says it does.