FORGOTTEN AXIOMS OF PIANO BUILDING

One hundred years ago, it was stated by Nels Boe, Tuners’ Journal technical editor from 1921 to 1930 that “In Europe a pin is never hammered. Driving is not good for a pin. If you hammer it in, you destroy the thread, which is essential to keep the tuning pin from slipping.”

Nels Boe further stated that: “There is no doubt that if the practice of turning the pin in (or at least partly in) were employed we should have a pin not only smoother in its turning, but a pin on which the pin block would have a firmer grip. No one who has tuned the old German pianos such as Bluthner, Bechstein and Grotrian Steinweg, or the French pianos Erard, Graveau and Pleyel, will deny that the pins in those pianos did not turn smoothly and that they usually ‘stuck’ where one set them. They were all pianos in which the pins were turned in, but to follow this practice under the specialized manufacturing methods common in this country most likely would not produce the same satisfactory results.

“To turn in a pin requires not only the utmost care, but time and patience. If the pin is turned in too fast or too continuously, it will become heated and burnish the hole, lessening, if not entirely destroying, the necessary friction between the pin and the block. The utmost care must also be exercised in the preparation of the drilled hole and the handling of the pin. No shavings or wood particles left from the drilling must be permitted to remain in the hole and the pin, as well as the inside of the hole, must be covered with a layer of powdered rosin.

“It is natural that where satisfactory results depend upon such elaborate preparations and painstaking care; where a little slip or something overlooked may affect the object aimed at, or spell trouble; and where different persons are engaged in the work, that such a process cannot be divided into parts and successfully accomplished as a whole unless each person fully realizes the importance of his part in the finished whole. This ideal condition, it is unnecessary to say, is not frequently met under specialized manufacturing methods.

Therefore, unlike his European colleague, in whose factory the entire process connected with the stringing is done by one man, the American manufacturer has adopted the practice best suited to his manufacturing methods and one which provides fewer chances of anything going wrong, namely, to drive in the pin.”

This goes entirely against what has been taught at least since I have been a piano technician. I think that since we as rebuilders do custom work, we should do it that way at least once to see for ourselves the results.