Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Trimming grand dampers

I was at a church yesterday morning. Amazingly the tuning had hardly budged since last year (Dampp-chaser helps!). After touching up a few unisons and spot voicing a few hammers I had to decide what to do with the rest of my time. I decided to attack the dampers. Here is a video that shows the effect of trimming the wedges that hang below the strings. Not only does this help the damper "whoosh" that happens when you step on the pedal, it also makes a very noticeable difference on slow key release. The untrimmed dampers cut off less cleanly, and earlier than the trimmed damper. It took about 90 minutes to work through the section, and was also an opportunity to lubricate the wires and damper guide bushings and improve alignment.


Dampers on the left have been trimmed, dampers on the right are waiting to be trimmed:

What tool do you use for trimming?

Never done that. I suppose you remove the damper head from the piano and you trim the felt with a razor blade, don't you?

I use a pair of high quality German hair cutting sissors that I bought from Jurgen at Pianoforte supply.

http://www.pianofortesupply.com/tools/pliersscissors/damper-scissors/damper-scissors-5-5-3/

hi,rysowers
which kind oil or something tools was used to damper's bushes and wire?

I use paste wax and steel wool or Scotch-Brite.

BDBs advice sounds good. I used Protek Prolube because I carry it in my main toolkit.

It's an excelent way to reduce whosh, but does it is necessary to remove the dampers?

I don't know how you could accurate cut the dampers without removing them. It needs to be a fairly precise cut, and you have a lot of control with the damper removed. It only take a few seconds to remove a damper, and not very long to put it in either, so the extra time is worth the better precision.

Provided you know how to correctly put it in...