Dilemma. Change piano or serious restoration?

Clearly I meant to say that a hammer head indicated by the manufacturer as "for Steinway" will not also be "for Schimmel"...

It's a bit like wanting to use an Intel processor on an Apple computer: they are both excellent products, but perhaps they don't work well together since they are designed for two different applications.

Celibidache wrote:

I understand your troubles and personally, as formative as they were in a sense, they were "fatal" years that I prefer not to think about.

here is the keyword, fatal years; now my entire bet lies there, the titanic task is to recover them......

The "but first we have to regulate it" was the most common way of reaching into the wallet (I don't want to say robbery, one of these even cost 500 euros), so many promises and then they systematically disappeared without doing anything concrete to the instrument (in this way, over 1000 euros were swiped from me (with that sum I could have at least bought a new set of bridges, even if I wouldn't have needed them).

No one noticed that the weighting wasn't there at all?........very "strange" The "regulation" they did for me lasted maybe two months, then the friction changed and ciao ciao.

The most blatant case was a technician who came to my house to regulate it once more; he gave me an estimate of 2500 euros (for Abel), then I waited for his call, he didn't make himself heard, then I called him back saying I wanted Renner, between one excuse and another six months passed and in the end I realized he didn't want to take on the job (now I understand why, but at least the honesty to say it instead of making someone who has to work waste all that time?). Fortunately, at least I still have these 2500 euros in my pocket. Then there was the "but Renner is made in China," that was an own goal since you just have to take a look on Google. Then there was the most imaginative "you don't like this piano," I called him to complain and he wouldn't answer, I changed cell phones and he replied "well, I didn't want to answer" "no, it's just that I was driving" eh sure, right, driving from 8 in the morning to 8 at night for three consecutive days, then be a truck driver, not a technician. Or again "the factory does not provide original materials."

I have started now, with great humility, study, and patience, to do the re-weighting. One begins to see some results; since I am not able to remove the lead from the hole and put new ones in, but I am capable of melting lead, I am plugging the holes that had been drilled with a drill, trying to homogenize and understand where the lead was originally located, and above all putting it where it is completely missing (I can't stay still, while waiting I try....). It is clearly improving! Now there is more control, I catch the pianissimos and the mezzo-fortes much more simply (before many notes would sound once and not once, because the oscillations were all different!)

I was given three options

-set of drilled hammer heads, not pre-tuned

-set of drilled hammer heads, machine pre-tuned

-set of drilled hammer heads, hand pre-tuned

Glued styli were not mentioned, despite me including it in the request. My doubt now is this: qualitatively, how much difference is there between "machine pre-tuned" and "hand pre-tuned"? The price difference is practically triple.....

Who gave you these instructions? The parent company?

Anyway, manual voicing is the "final" step... but even with mechanized voicing, you should receive a very good hammer felt at home.

(In practice, the difference lies in the various stages of felt preparation... shaving, punching, any possible impregnation... every company has its own "way," which is why a brand-name piano rarely sounds like new again after an "outsider" technician has done the work: only at the factory do they know how much and how to prepare the hammer felt in relation to their piano.)

Right. The manual one might be closer to the final one. Anyway, pre-tuning it, as our friend Celibidache says, is already a "lady hammerer." Pay attention to the lead weighting: know how to stop yourself so that you obtain not the minimum downward weight, but the right and sufficient return weight of the key.....but surely you are aware of this concept. You can try removing the lead on a base with a small tap in the center. If it has been greatly expanded and needs to be lightened, you can use a milling bit (e.g., to lighten a 13 mm lead, use a 10 mm milling bit) without removing it. It is clear that you must not stray too far from the presumed original weighting. A progressive and, above all, regular decrease or increase in weighting guarantees the uniformity of the friction coefficients.