Steinway B Scale Conversion

[John Delacour]

At 5:20 pm -0700 3/4/07, David Love wrote:

>Just in case I wasn’t clear, the idea of integrating these three 
>elements (scale, soundboard and hammer) is something, the importance 
>of which, Del Fandrich really has impressed upon me and I’ve heard 
>it successfully put into practice many times over the past several 
>years.  While there are clearly choices to be made about what level 
>appeals to us, the idea of integrating the three elements is, in my 
>experience, critical.

The "baby grand" phenomenon is a good illustration of this principle. 
In my early days as a string-maker we used to make all the covered 
string sets for the Blüthner workshop in London.  As a restorer I was 
impressed with the quality of the bass in the Blüthner 'Style 4' 5ft 
grand, which has 13 double-covered singles spun on very thin (18.5 
mwg) cores rising in tension from 120lbs to 200lbs (37% to 62% of 
breaking strain by my reckoning,as per recent posts) -- a very 
unusual set-up for a small grand but surprisingly successful.  One 
day they send me a rubbing for a 5' Steck (English Aeolian Co.) grand 
and I thought I'd do them a favour by following Blüthner's scaling 
principles for this piano, which is a far stiffer thing altogether, 
fairly typical of mass-produced small grands of the period.  The 
result was a total failure, as would be obvious to me today.  Though 
I never heard the result, I imagine from their description that the 
strings were just sitting there quietly vibrating to themselves and 
leaving the bridge and soundboard virtually oblivious to their song.

This same little Blüthner, with 26 bass notes (too few of course) has 
two covered trichords on the long bridge to fake the break.  These 
are No. 12 (sic) steel covered with 0.20mm copper -- an apparently 
ridiculous design that happens to do the job after a fashion.  On 
Blüthner 4 of my own I later tried what seemed to be a more rational 
design for these break notes, using thicker cores.  The result was 
abysmal and I reverted to the maker's original fudge.

I should also say that the Blüthner hammer is a light one of a very 
individual design.

The baby grand is far less forgiving of bad scale design than longer 
pianos, but the same principles apply.  If a scale is proposed that 
bears not the slightest resemblance to the scale of any surviving 
piano in 150 years of piano-making history, it is not that such a 
scale has never been tried by any maker during all those years and 
hundreds of thousands of pianos produced.  It is because such a thing 
has been universally rejected.

JD