Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum only up! Tuning hammer technique maxim_tuner ( from9 by 12 )

Johnkie,thank you very much for your message. You have confirmed correctness of my assumptions about operation of the lever on the left for a vertical piano (9-12)

Seriously, Jon, dont you find that the left position is giving less control on deep setting, becuse the tuning pin brakes too easily (too early)

Or you have a way to control the moment ?
I had no much success in that posture, on sloppy old blocks. on others as soon as you leave the pin it "goes to bed" immeiately.

Oleg -
I was trained by some of the most respected craftsmen here in London, have been tuning both private and concert work for 47 years and have never found using my right hand when tuning uprights to be anywhere near as good as using my left. The only time I use my right hand on uprights is when I am chipping up ... either on re-strings or pitch raising with the action removed.

I realise there are many who tune only right handed, whether upright or grand, and do a good job, but feel that your implication of using one's left hand for uprights being a inferior method is a wild assumption based on nothing more than personal taste. There are good reasons why .... and equally good reasons why grands are almost always tuned using the right hand.

With every best wish.
John

Hi thanks for the answer, but I certainly do not doubt of your training and ability.

It is simply my experience that I did not find how to refrain the tuning pin to stop itselt as soon as I left the lever.

Do you use some laterall pressure to allow the pin to grip lower ?

I admit in my mind it have to do with "active settng" if compared with "natural setting" , if you see what I mean.

Anyway no big success there with low torqued pinblocks.

Then the precision is to be trained, of course , and I understan the basic physical reasons to tune left handed the uprights (be it for the piano or for the tuner) .

ALl the best

Isaac is talking of the left position which I take to mean 9-11 o'clock, and the way the pin behaves when manipulated that way. John talks only of the use of the left hand and made no reference to the lever position. It reads to me as though this is the cause of some misunderstanding.
Correct me of I'm wrong.

Yes that is, and for upright pianos only (on grands the left position is good when lowering the pitch)

Yes the way the pin behave I have less control on it with that 9:0 11:00 position, that is why I ask Jon if there is a trick or a method to keep the contact with the bottom of the pin when tuning that way.

On a piano, the pin settle naturally in its "bed" with minimal pression, usually. I find that the just the weight of the handle is enough to push the tuning pin in its natural posture, if the lever is on the left side.

When we get very soft tuning pins to hold firm enough it is because we can get a control on the very bottom of them
Even if the total twist angle that can be added to a pin is about 1 or 2°, that make a difference if it is installed by the lever or if the wire force is the only source of torquing the pin.

I could not obtain that kind of control with the left posture, to my disappointment, as I appreciate all the rest, the unlocking of the pin which is easy, less stress on the back, etc...

May be I did not work that enough...

Very interesting video

i was also taught to tune exclusively left-handed. We were also taught that the closer one can get to 11 or 12, the better. There would be less risk of bending the pin, or if the pin did bend slightly, the less it would matter because the bend would be from left to right, not up. So if the pin did bend and return to its original shape later, if it less likely to alter the tuning. .

I usually try to position the tuning lever at 11. But I will go closer to 9 if the block is extremely tight and I need the leverage.

One method I was shown and I still use for about 75% of verticals, is to rest my hand on top of the piano and then have the lever go across the back/side of my hand, wrapping the thumb around the other side of the lever. The thumb is used for downward pressure and for control. So, the tuning lever is a lever, and my hand/arm is another lever acting on the tuning lever.

I will also grip as close to the tip as leverage will permit me.

This method requires great hand strength.

A warning though... This method is very hard on the hand. Depending on your hand structure and other genetic factors, you could be shortening your tuning career.

I use it because it gives me excellent results as to tuning stability. But, I do pay a price for using it.

thanks for the witnessing. Then how do you expect the pin to bend, in the end ? what direction, none ?

the left position, seem more designed to avoid pushing on the bed of the pin when raising the pitch of the note.

pin twist always in the same direction - to bend them, one need to be particularly brutal whatever method used

When the lever is about 11:00 12:00 the position is
advantageous whatever side you are sitting.

I would say that the pin is better set with that orientation, but generally we do not like to change the lever posture while tuning, if possible.

What I said above apply to a lever in 9:00 11:00 where the weight of the tool is acting on the tuning pin more.

To each his own. I use my right hand, but I haven't yet learned to use my left foot.

In an ideal world, the pin will not bend at all. The pin will simply rotate. That's why the closer the hand is to the tip using the method I mentioned, the less likely the pin will bend.

That is also why you need such great hand strength-to absolutely control the lever and not let it flagpole at all as you rotate it.

But, little errors do happen. If I make an error and do slightly bend the pin, the effects are minimized when the error happens at 11. If the pin bends upward or downward, it is more likely to change the tuning of the string when it returns to its correct shape later on. If I make an error and bend the pin slightly to the right, it is less likely to affect the pitch of the string later when it returns to its original shape. But again, the idea is not to bend the pin at all.

Using the method I mentioned, if there is too much torque, you would move your hand further away from the pin/fulcrum. If that still doesn't give you sufficient leverage, then moving the lever closer to 10 or 9 will give you even more leverage.

Moving the lever to 10 or 9 probably would not give you any advantage with tight pins using other techniques.

This method is very good for vertical pianos with wildly jumpy pins, but without a string lag problem. But, there is a physical cost.

Joe, I'm having a hard time to picture what you're describing. Do you perhaps have a picture?

No problem, Mark.

Here are 4 pics i shot tonight. It's hard to see in the photos, but the veins really start to pop out on my left hand and arm after I start tuning this way.

I usually use the slow rotation method. But sometimes, i use a sort of quasi-impact style and throw the hammer in a controlled fashion. Edit: Unlike a lot of tuners on here, i actually like a slightly loose-fitting tip. Ironically, I feel it gives me more control... even with jumpy pins.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8043014@N06/8728283834/in/photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8043014@N06/8727165177/in/photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8043014@N06/8727165019/in/photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8043014@N06/8727164441/in/photostream

Does it really matter which hand is used if the tuning lever is being manipulated in this flippy-floppy, imprecise, waggling around we have seen in the videos in this particular thread so far?

If the object is to turn the pin with minimal twisting and minimal flagpoling with minimal turning of the pin for ultimate stability, then it certainly begins to matter which hand is used.

I know many pianos that have been tuned properly three to four hundred times a year for many years with no appreciable wear on the pinblock. All the videos shown in this thread so far will certainly cause unnecessary wear on a pinblock and the bearing points involved.

Surely anybody who reads these threads intelligently can not be suckered in by sloppy techniques put forward by people who have yet to show us a piano that stays in tune past the first moderately loud chord?

Solid techniques that don't wear the pin block have been discussed at length in Max's other thread and I know some intelligent tuners have gained a lot from that discussion, even though others, it seems, haven't. That's the great thing about an international forum like this, thousands, if not millions of people can learn from the replies even if the original poster learns nothing. I am confident that there are (and will be when others read the archives in the future) enough tuners out there who can sort the wheat from the chaff and gain from these discussions.

Anybody aspiring to first class concert work will find it the easiest work they ever did if they will learn the most efficient ways of working. Most of it is on pianos that were tuned only hours ago. There is mostly nothing to do and the reason for those extra "tunings" is more for insurance than anything but occasionally there are pitch raises that have to be done solidly and in record time. Funny thing is, by using nothing but time tested standard tuning lever technique, I can pitch raise far faster and more solidly than I ever could with the oddball methods I have tried from time to time in order to speed my work up or make it "easier" Hah!

None of what is in this thread is what I would call time tested standard tuning lever technique and disturbs the pin and string too much to be of any use if the tuning is important in any way.

I speak as someone who was taught correctly, made forays into alternate techniques for various reasons and returned to solid techniques.

For reasons of my own, I went from being a concert tuner in London to being a boondocks tuner in rural USA for many joyful years, (amazing how much work out there) then a few other fascinating byways and back to concert tuning in London. I am familiar with the standards accepted for most forms of tuning.

One thing puzzles me, why haven't our physicists on this forum worked out the moments of force on the tuning pin and string and given us a definitive tuning lever angle for any flagpoling to have the least effect on the pull of the string. We empiricals know what works and I did see some science once that corroborated it. It would add to the discussion.

What RxD said ..... says pretty much all that needs to be said

Amen.

Some of the posts in the Piano Tuner-Technicians forum are to be viewed with a certain sense of alarm. One can only wonder just how much of this is being inflicted on client pianos. Short of closing the forum altogether, I am not sure what the answer is. Debate only seems to add to the confusion. And then there's youtube. Clearly some of these "experts" aren't going anywhere soon.

Here's a long shot, though history is not on the side of success: Perhaps with introspection, a realization might ensue resulting in great benefit for all; namely, that some of us should be doing more listening and less talking - more learning and less teaching.


"Think of it as how a circle expands – from the more familiar territory to the less so. That way, a child gradually acquires both a knowledge of history and an historic way of looking at the world, which might be summed up as the ingrained understanding that it didn't start this morning. It was the Roman orator Cicero who warned that 'not to know what took place before you were born is to remain forever a child.'

"Only geese and fools, it's been said, believe the world is created anew every day. Well, we're not sure geese are that dumb, but to judge by some of the utopian schemes we keep hearing proposed, as if they hadn't been tried and failed before, humans certainly can be."

-Paul Greenberg

Thank,Johnkie

Dear rxd, thanks for the message. Although it is immodest, but for myself understood and I will do in the future only:
1 for upright piano 9-12
2 for grand piano 3-6
And let me be sentenced to be burned Inquisition piano technicians, throwing into my fire corrugated cardboard shims

I look at it this way. As long as one is using a traditional lever, flagpoling is a way of life and cannot be eliminated. The point is to use it to your advantage. Flagpoling is not always the enemy. In fact, how many of us use a final nudge to "bend" the pin to get the string that final cent or two? In other words, that final "leaning" of the pin.

As long as you are pulling or pushing a tuning pin with a traditional lever that gives you the leverage required to turn the pin, the pin is going to bend. It follows that in setting, it has to be unbent.

When using a Reyburn grand Cyberhammer, with its dual weights (I don't have one), you are applying pure torque with no bending. Unless you can simulate that with a traditional lever, you're bending the pin whether you realize it or not.