Checks cause hammer bounce ?

[Andrew and Rebeca Anderson]

Sounds like the hammer rail needs some stiffening a la Jon Page's instructions.

Andrew Anderson

At 05:38 PM 3/14/2007, you wrote:
>Hi folks
>
>I ran into a symptom I haven't identified before.  I was bedding an 
>older Steinway D today, and made sure all three rails were good and 
>done in the right order... yet I was still getting too much hammer 
>bounce in the bass section on a hard blow.  The rest of the piano 
>was just fine... just the bass section had this problem.  Started 
>troubleshooting by first lifting the whippen up with my finger and 
>hitting the key hard to see if there was any bounce... nope..  Then 
>I lifted the hammer with a shank hook and hit the key hard... still 
>no bounce.... Then I noticed that when I lowered the shank enough 
>for the back check to make contact with the hammer tail... the 
>neighboring hammers started to bounce.  When I let the hammer go 
>into full check the full effect of neighboring bounce kicked in.
>
>I haven't managed to pounce out what the cure for this is.  Checking 
>distance is 15 mm... action is reasonably well regulated... drop is 
>a bit deep but letoff, dip and aftertouch amounts are all well 
>within good tolerances.
>
>Any advice on the matter is of course very welcome.
>
>Cheers
>RicB